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N O V E M B E R 1 3 , 2 0 17

TRUMP’S RUSSIA CRISIS GROWS

BY MOLLY BALL

China won.

By Ian Bremmer

By Ian Bremmer

BY MOLLY BALL time.com

VOL. 190, NO. 20 | 2017

2 | Conversation 4 | For the Record

The Brief News from the U.S. and around the world

5 | The first fatal terrorist attack in New York City since 9/11 shows the limits of security, and the city’s resilience 9 | Inside the

convention preparing women to run for office 10 | Spain reasserts

control over Catalonia 12 | Why Kevin

Spacey’s coming out reinforced harmful stereotypes

The View Ideas, opinion, innovations

The Features  Trump in Asia

the chief obstacle to innovation

The President’s visit comes as China’s rising global stature casts a shadow over the U.S.

By Ian Bremmer 16 Plus: China’s new Silk Road

By Charlie Campbell 20

15 | How

Mueller’s Opening Moves

mustaches got groomed for civic engagement

The first indictments in the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election meddling suggest the trouble is only beginning for the Trump Administration

By Molly Ball 28

13 | Frontline advice

for ending the opioid epidemic 14 | 100 CEOs on

Time Off What to watch, read, see and do

45 | Taika Waititi’s

superhuman journey to directing Thor: Ragnarok 49 | Review: Greta

△ An oil field on the outskirts of Karamay, in China’s westernmost province of Xinjiang, in May 2016 Photograph by Patrick Wack

Gerwig’s latest film, Lady Bird 50 | The new politics

of late-night 52 | 8 Questions

with historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Most Influential Teens TIME selects 30 rising stars for its fifth annual list

By TIME staff 38

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Conversation

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE?

RE “NEXT GENERATION Leaders” [Oct. 23]: Actors, pop singers, coffee cuppers, comedians, filmmakers and, of all things, basketball players are among your “10 trailblazers.” Give me a break.

Next year, let’s see if you can find a collection of truly ingenious, industrious and collaborative-minded young adults so that readers can have at least a slight hope for the earth’s future.

Donald F. Smith, EGAA, DENMARK THIS ARTICLE REMINDS ME that in the current events on earth, chaos is a call for reform. Here are examples of courage and good that bless a world desperate for change. I am encouraged and emboldened. Thank you.

Leialoha Faulkner, TUCSON, ARIZ. EXPECTING MORE FROM MEN

RE “HOW DO YOU SOLVE A Problem Like Harvey Weinstein?” [Oct. 23]: Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein represents a form of extreme masculinity. To solve a problem like him, we need to start by recognizing men’s role in feminism. Until men act as advocates for the women in their lives, society will never be equal. For too long, women have been the subordinates of men, enabling them to fulfill their career goals at the

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TIME November 13, 2017

expense of their own. Until these men respect women as equals, and society recognizes that men and women are different, the feminist agenda will fail. Men must set aside some of their own career ambition, embrace their role at home and ensure that women have the capacity to be the future leaders of Fortune 500 companies.

Matthew Forbes, LISBURN, NORTHERN IRELAND WHY IS IT THAT MOST OF the articles and opinions I have read recently about the Weinstein scandal are written by women? I want to read more material by men who are the fathers of daughters, who can express their thoughts on this subject. I want them to serve as the inspiration and teachers for their sons and other young boys to grow up respecting women and never follow the Weinstein way.

Lina Broydo, LOS ALTOS HILLS, CALIF. WISER WORDS

RE “THE CAMPUS CULTURE Wars” [Oct. 23]: The right is effective at gaining space for its views, and a key tactic is to claim that it is being prevented from speaking because its views are different.

Liberal progressives validate this approach when they denounce the right as “Nazis.”

Progressives must destroy the right’s arguments, not just hurl abuse. Get wise, then get wiser—wiser than them.

Laurence Nasskau, BROCKHAM, ENGLAND TRYING TO BREAK AWAY

RE “CRISIS IN CATALONIA” [Oct. 23]: History tells us that nationalism can hurt a society. That is what is happening in Catalonia. Over the years, irresponsible politicians have created an emotional nationalism that is now hurting both those who want to be independent and those who don’t. Whatever the outcome, it will be sour for many people in Catalonia and the rest of Spain.

Jose Gabriel Ruiz Soler, VALENCIA, SPAIN I WAS BORN AND EDUCATED in Barcelona during Franco’s rule. Back then, the undercurrent of a movement aspir-

ing for autonomy in Catalonia, a rich province with her own language, was alive and vibrant. After Franco’s death, Catalonia voted for the adoption of a Spanish constitution, and Catalonia recovered political and cultural autonomy. It did not take long for the extremists to start demanding complete separation from Spain. The separatist movement is large but not as strong as some would like us to believe. Catalonia’s Carles Puigdemont does not realize that if independent, Catalonia would become a pariah in Europe.

Mariano S. Castrillón, JOHANNESBURG SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT ▶ In “When Millennials Rule” (Oct. 23), we misstated the year that Democrats held the fewest number of seats in Congress. Democrats had fewer seats in the 114th Congress (2015–17) than in any Congress since the 80th Congress (1947–49).

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More than 25 years of helping children reach for their dreams.

For the Record

6

‘The policy regarding “inciti g” violence was too vague.’

T-Swift Tied Rihanna for most No. 1s on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart

REDDIT, announcing the social network will delete any content that

“encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or a group of people” and animals; Nazi and white-nationalist threads were among the first posts banned

$17.8 million Winning bid for actor Paul Newman’s Rolex watch, thought to be the most expensive wristwatch ever sold at auction, according to Phillips auction house

Number of chocolate-covered paper packages designed to make 3 kg of heroin look like cakes that a Guatemalan man admitted to attempting to sneak through Newark Liberty International Airport

‘North Korea’s nuclear state cannot be accepted or tolerated.’

GOOD WEEK BAD WEEK

‘THE COLLISIONS WERE AVOIDABLE.’ ADMIRAL JOHN RICHARDSON,

T-Mobile Merger talks with Sprint were expected to be called off

chief of U.S. naval operations, summarizing the results of an official inquiry that concluded poor safety preparations and navigational errors led to the two collisions between Navy destroyers and commercial vessels in the Western Pacific last summer that killed 17 sailors

MOON JAE-IN, South Korean President, in his 60

second state-of-the-nation address

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Miles traveled by a new United flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Singapore’s Changi Airport, now the longest nonstop service from the U.S. in terms of miles

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President, reacting to the indictment of campaign chairman Paul Manafort in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election

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BETTE MIDLER, actor, dissing the idea of a Disney Channel remake of Hocus Pocus, one of her most popular films

S O U R C E S: B I L L B O A R D ; F O R T U N E ; N E W YO R K T I M E S; P E O P L E ; W A L L S T R E E T J O U R N A L ; W A S H I N G T O N P O S T

I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y B R O W N B I R D D E S I G N F O R T I M E

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‘THERE IS NO COLLUSION!’

NATION

The new terrorism comes to Ground Zero

By Karl Vick

The aftermath of the Oct. 31 vehicular terrorist attack that killed eight people in lower Manhattan PHOTOGR APH BY BEBETO MATTHEWS

TheBrief

Truck enters bike path

Clarkson St.

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IN THE 16 YEARS AFTER THE Twin Towers fell, the desolation of lower Manhattan in time gave way to a blossoming. When Sayfullo Saipov drove his rented Home Depot truck onto a bicycle path at 3:04 p.m. on Oct. 31, killing eight people beneath its wheels, he careened down the Hudson River Greenway, a lushly landscaped urban esplanade. At Houston Street, where he first steered onto the path, a pier now does service as a soccer field. His route south took him past trees, benches and charmingly inventive playgrounds with miniature golf and beach volleyball before he crashed into a school bus at Chambers Street under the glass and steel high-rises of the financial district.

That six of the eight fatalities were tourists came as no shock to New Yorkers, who in the city’s landmark neighborhoods navigate streams of visitors, many astride the Citi Bikes that lay crushed on the asphalt pathway.

Foreign visits to the city dropped after 2001, but they have more than doubled since, to nearly 13 million a year. At the 9/11 Memorial, four to five blocks beyond where a police officer shot and wounded Saipov, there are days that a passerby, hurrying under the adolescent swamp white oaks that ring the black granite pools and the 2,983 names inscribed atop its walls, hears not a word of English spoken.

Terrorism has also changed since 9/11. Al-Qaeda, with its singular passion for spectacular destruction and its hierarchical command structure, never pulled off an encore. But its narrative of a Western war against Islam gained traction after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, spawning ISIS, a militant Islamic guerrilla group that doubled as a movement open to all. Near the rented truck, officials found a handwritten note lauding ISIS. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Saipov had grown interested in ISIS only after entering the U.S. from his native Uzbekistan in 2010.

ISIS encourages self-starters, and officials said they knew of no evidence that this was anything other than the form terrorism has taken of late in the West: the lone-wolf vehicular attack that has claimed dozens of lives in Nice, Berlin, London, Stockholm and Barcelona. “The insight is anyone

Ch am be rs

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can pull this off, even when there are defensive countermeasures put in place,” says Clint Watts, a former FBI counterterrorism special agent.

The New York City police department has been preoccupied with terrorism since the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center, in 1993 (with a bomb loaded into a truck rented, like Saipov’s vehicle, in New Jersey). Today more than 1,000 members of the NYPD are devoted to counterterrorism. Only some of that rank are meant to be seen, like the helmeted officers bearing assault rifles in the hours after the attack in the Oculus, the transit hub and shopping mall that—with its soaring atrium and white wingspan—many regard as a symbol of rebirth beside Ground Zero.

But in a city where 37% of residents

were born overseas, the NYPD also relies on an ambitious intelligence network, regarded as second only to the CIA’s. A decade after 9/11, that effort came under fire for overreaching and was called out for its surveillance of mosques and whole neighborhoods. But it remains a robust effort, woven into the fabric of a city defined by its waves of new arrivals. In a cab not long ago, the driver rolled down the window to chat in Bengali with a traffic officer. When we moved on, the driver said he had been asking after the cop’s son, who was also NYPD, but “doesn’t wear a uniform; he’s just around.”

THE HALLOWEEN ATTACK was the first fatal terrorist strike in New York City since Sept. 11, 2001. Its toll was also emotional.

P R E V I O U S PA G E : A P/S H U T T E R S T O C K ; AT TA C K : B R E N D A N M C D E R M I D — R E U T E R S; A N G E L I N I , E R L I J , F E R R U C H I , M E N D O Z A , PA G N U C C O : T R E V I S A N F A M I LY/A P ; C L E V E S , D R A K E : F A C E B O O K ; D E C A D T: C O U R T E S Y A L E X A N D E R N A E S S E N S

The lives that were lost The attack killed eight people: a project manager from New Jersey, a New York man who lived nearby, a Belgian mother of two and five Argentine nationals celebrating their 30th graduation anniversary.

Diego Enrique Angelini Age 47 Argentina

Nicholas Cleves Age 23 New York, N.Y.

Darren Drake Age 32 New Milford, N.J.

Ann-Laure Decadt Age 31 Belgium

An injured woman is given oxygen by first responders after the terrorist attack, which killed eight people along the West Side Highway in lower Manhattan on Oct. 31

“I got out of the subway and heard the sirens and thought, Oh God. Oh God. Not this again,” says Michaela Jones, 28, who was a teenager living in Queens on 9/11. Now, not an hour after Saipov was brought down, Jones held the hand of her 2-year-old daughter, dressed as Cinderella; she had just picked her up at day care a stone’s throw from the 9/11 Memorial.

“It’s a part of life for everyone in New York,” says Walter Wickiser, an art dealer who lived two blocks away when the towers fell. “It can happen to anyone.”

The aftermath to the bike-path attack carried a different quality, however. With victims along 20 blocks, it was not immediately clear what had happened. A mother waiting in her car to pick up her kids on Chambers Street heard the rental truck crumple the school bus—“It was like aluminum foil,” she said—but an hour later still thought she had witnessed a hit-and-run.

Halloween, meanwhile, went forward. Behind yellow police tape, a teenager dressed as a mummy, swaddled in toilet paper and masking tape, held Wonder Woman’s hand. In Greenwich Village, the city’s annual costume parade proceeded, with extra police joining the throngs.

Nor was this terrorist attack an occasion for solemn declarations of

Ariel Erlij Age 48 Argentina

Hernan Ferruchi Age 47 Argentina

Hernan Mendoza Age 47 Argentina

Alejandro Damian Pagnucco Age 47 Argentina

TheBrief

TIME November 13, 2017

A Citi Bike, a bicycle rental popular in New York City, was marked as evidence on the Hudson River Greenway after the terrorist attack on Oct. 31

on the real solution—antiterrorism funding—which he proposed cutting in his most recent budget.”

The emerging facts around Saipov also had a familiar ring. In interviews with neighbors and associates, the suspect was described in terms similar to the Chechen mastermind of the Boston Marathon bombing: less than successful and given to anger, especially on the question of U.S. military actions in Muslim nations. At 29, he had lived in Florida, Ohio and, recently, New Jersey; he was married and had young children.

News reports said Saipov was already known to U.S. investigators, apparently because he had associated with people suspected of preparing to act on extremist views. Officials said he had planned the attack for more than a year and timed it to Halloween in hopes of injuring more people. The FBI on Nov. 1 announced that it was seeking a second man, Mukhammadzoir Kadirov, also from Uzbekistan, in connection with the attack.

AFTER THE Charlie Hebdo attack, when former ISIS fighters rampaged

across the offices of a Paris satirical weekly with assault weapons, the NYPD counterterrorism unit drilled on how to contain and neutralize a rifle attack in the city. When the threat became trucks, they paid calls on truck- and car-rental agencies across the region, including New Jersey, briefing clerks on what might constitute a suspicious customer. Saipov, who had worked as a truck driver, evidently was not flagged.

“People are essentially copying what works,” says Charlie Winter, a researcher with the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence in London. “It’s very clearly something that doesn’t take much planning and can have a high impact. I think it’s that rather than some kind of organizational ingenuity on ISIS’s part.”

Two blocks beyond Chambers Street, the crowds that gather for the 9/11 Memorial are protected by stainlesssteel bollards, a security effort that functions as part of the public display.

There will certainly be some soon where Houston Street meets the bike path, security being, like terrorism, a feature of the New York City landscape.

—With reporting by SIMON SHUSTER/ BERLIN; JARED MALSIN/CAIRO; HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS/NEW YORK; and TESSA BERENSON and PHILIP ELLIOTT/WASHINGTON 

A N D R E S K U D A C K I — A P/S H U T T E R S T O C K

political unity. At NYPD headquarters, Mayor Bill de Blasio stood beside Cuomo, his longtime rival, both calling for stoic resilience. But President Trump quickly took up a cudgel, tweeting early the next morning that the suspect had entered on “the ‘Diversity Visa Lottery Program,’ a Chuck Schumer beauty.”

Saipov did indeed enter the U.S. on that program, which allots visas at random to citizens of nations who account for few U.S. immigrants. But Schumer, a New Yorker and the Senate’s ranking Democrat, was not only an architect of the visa plan signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1990; he also moved to roll it back in 2013.

That effort passed the Senate but died in the GOP-controlled House. “I guess it’s not too soon to politicize a tragedy,” Schumer tweeted in response.

In naked political terms, the attack offered something for nearly everyone.

Advocates of stricter gun laws could point to what Saipov held, as he circled the pavement after the collision, shouting, “Allahu akbar”: in one hand, a pellet gun, and in the other, a paintball gun. None of the shots he fired were fatal, and it’s possible that New York City’s firearm laws, which are among the strictest in the nation, helped hold down the death toll.

Advocates of tougher immigration restrictions summoned fresh outrage.

Uzbekistan, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation in Central Asia, was not on the list of countries whose residents were to be barred from U.S. entry by Trump’s latest travel ban (which a federal court in Hawaii has suspended). But six hours after the attack, the President underscored a newer program in effect at airports worldwide: “I have just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program.

Being politically correct is fine, but not for this!” he tweeted.

Those who argue for more nuanced antiterrorism measures also pressed their case. “I have always believed and continue to believe that immigration is good for America,” Schumer said in a statement. “President Trump, instead of politicizing and dividing America, which he always seems to do at times of national tragedy, should be focusing

TICKER Classified JFK records released The White House authorized the release of 2,891 classified records relating to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. One 1963 note suggested that the FBI knew of a death threat to Kennedy’s killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was fatally shot by club owner Jack Ruby.

Kenya elects President, again Uhuru Kenyatta was elected President of Kenya for the second time in three months.

The country’s supreme court nullified the results of the election in August, citing irregularities. Opposition supporters boycotted the second vote.

Transgender military ban barred

J U N F U H A N — D E T R O I T F R E E P R E S S/ T N S/G E T T Y I M A G E S

The Trump Administration was temporarily barred from instating a ban on transgender individuals in the military, which was set to take effect next year. A federal judge said the White House policy was based on “disapproval of transgender people generally.”

Meth found in Halloween stash A parent in Keshena, Wis., found a small bag of crystal meth among her child’s trick-or-treat candy. Police said it was unclear whether the drugs, which the child did not ingest, had been given away on purpose.

First they shared their #MeToo stories.

Now they’re running for office

By Charlotte Alter/Detroit HUNDREDS OF WOMEN SAT CROSS-LEGGED father roamed the halls, caring for a fussy on the floor in packed conference rooms baby. Men’s restrooms became all-gender making to-do lists: Call your neighbor and bathrooms, where urinals stood unused for ask her for money. Open a campaign bank days. Interruptions were rare, and on one account. Get the party’s voter file. Knock panel, the “talking stick” was a photo of on the doors in your district. The women Democratic Representative Maxine Waters, listened quietly as their lists grew, taking the convention headliner. In panels on sexual notes in neat handwriting, then closed their violence, tears came easily and often: without notebooks and stowed them in their bags. men around, crying lost its stigma.

When they got back home to Utah or Illinois or New York, they’d start crossing things off.

BUT THE CONVENTION wasn’t designed as “I look at my list that I gotta do, if it’s make a therapy session; it was a crash course in 10 phone calls, fill out four forms, notify electoral politics. “Just imagine if Congress seven people,” says was 51% women,” Val Montgomery, said Gillibrand in her 45, who plans to speech on opening run for Illinois state night. “Do you think representative next it would be so hard year. “My goal every to change workplace single day is to do rules that are stuck in two items.” the Mad Men era?”

The Women’s Experts from Convention, which organizations like drew more than Emily’s List and Vote 5,000 people to Run Lead were there Detroit from Oct. 27 to give practical to 29, had been advice on running More than 5,000 women gathered in Detroit on planned long before for office: how to Oct. 27 to 29 to plan for the midterm elections the #MeToo campaign vet yourself (check brought renewed your taxes), how attention to sexual harassment and assault. much money to raise (more than you think), But the outpouring of personal stories from what works (direct text messaging) and what women both famous and not stoked anger doesn’t (boring social-media posts). that had been simmering for months. As the According to Emily’s List, which recruits three-day convention kicked off with a tearful Democratic, pro–abortion rights candidates, speech by actor, survivor and advocate Rose more than 20,500 women have inquired McGowan and ended that first night with about running this year, a 20-fold increase orations from Senators Kirsten Gillibrand over previous years. “The [2016] election and Amy Klobuchar, the agenda became made me feel like obviously anyone can hold clear: to transform the fury of thousands of elected office. Literally anyone,” says Shireen women into votes, seats and majorities.

Ghorbani, 36, who is running for the U.S. “The conversation around sexual assault House of Representatives from Utah. and violence against women puts some For others, staying on the sidelines is no new energy into the movement,” says Linda longer an option. Maureen Martin, 60, says Sarsour, one of the national co-chairs of she feels a “responsibility” to run for county January’s Women’s March and the Women’s commission from her rural Michigan area, Convention, but “marching is just not because “if not me, who?” And Charlesetta enough.” In the short term, that movement Wilson, 39, who is strongly considering runhas one goal: “We have to win in 2018.” ning for the Michigan house of representaFor many women, the event offered a tives, says that for her, getting involved is as vision of a matriarchal world. There were much an obligation as a choice. “I almost feel panels on “self-care” and free yoga. A lone like it’s a little bit selfish not to run.” □

LightBox

Unionist supporters demonstrate in Barcelona on Oct. 29 PHOTOGR APH BY JON NAZCA—REUTERS

TIME November 13, 2017

WORLD

Spain takes charge of Catalonia and regains the upper hand EARLY ON OCT. 30, THE DEPOSED Catalan president Carles Puigdemont posted a photo on Instagram from inside the seat of his government. In fact, Puigdemont was nowhere near the Generalitat. He had fled to Belgium. The photo was apparently a feint.

Spaniards and Catalans are now asking whether the independence crisis that has gripped the country for five weeks might not prove to be the same.

After the Catalan parliament declared independence on Oct. 27, the streets of Barcelona filled with celebratory crowds. But the mood cooled when Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy exercised his power to take control of the region, removing the leaders of the Catalan government from office. He also pulled off a strategic victory by calling for surprise regional elections on Dec. 21, paralyzing the independistas and emboldening the so-called silent majority in Catalonia that favors staying in Spain.

The secessionists are now in disarray. Instead of drawing up a new constitution, they are trying to decide if and how they will participate in the vote. “They’re bewildered,” says Lluís Orriols, a professor of political science at Madrid’s Carlos III University. They expected Spain’s move to take control would spark fury, he says, “but Rajoy has shown great ability here, saying, ‘I’m not going to leave space for that anger.’”

What he did create space for was the voice of unionists, 300,000 of whom took to the streets in Barcelona on Oct. 29. While the courts ponder Puigdemont’s fate, the 52% of Catalan society that polls say supports remaining in Spain feels relieved. “For a long time, the independentist movement has been very successful at setting the agenda,” says Orriols. “Now it’s the central government calling the shots.”

—LISA ABEND/BARCELONA ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox

VIEWPOINT

misconceptions about homosexuality: that being gay inherently makes you a predator. Spacey’s alleged behavior, if true, is far worse than latching on to a movement toward inclusiveness at a wrong time. But the latching also does harm.

The cruelty of Kevin Spacey’s coming out

By Daniel D’Addario COMING OUT ISN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE. ONE OF THE many dividends of a rapid series of culture-shaking advances for the LGBT community is that celebrities who might once have risked livelihoods by admitting they were gay now experience little to no blowback. Coming out can even fuel a career renaissance. (Being seen as honest and happy in their personal lives has seemed to benefit the careers of gay performers like Neil Patrick Harris.) Coming out has changed along with the broader culture. What was once a splashy, daring decision that, say, sold magazines, has become something that happens more and more in an amiably low-key way—an aside in an interview or a few words in a post on social media. Given the benefits, to individuals and to society, when life is lived openly, that’s generally a very positive thing.

Which is what makes Kevin Spacey’s coming out so frustrating. It’s hard to remember a recent case quite like the one of the House of Cards star—that is to say, a case in which the general goodwill around coming out seemed to be used as a means to distract from another scandal.

The 58-year-old actor, who was the subject of rumor and innuendo for years but who was protected by long-standing media prohibitions against outing, came out via Twitter on Oct. 29. He did so within hours of a BuzzFeed News report of an alleged 1986 assault against the actor Anthony Rapp, then 14 years old. In a statement, Spacey said he couldn’t recall the incident due to the time that has elapsed and because he was under the influence of alcohol. The actor went on to say that he was ready to openly “live as a gay man” in order to “deal with this honestly and openly.”

KEVIN SPACEY,

in an Oct. 29 statement on Twitter

D A N I E L Z U C H N I K — W I R E I M A G E /G E T T Y I M A G E S

THERE’S AN ODD and ugly bit of rhetorical jiujitsu seemingly at work here. Spacey implied that the first step in dealing with the allegation againstt him is to acknowledge being gay, as though that would explain why an adult might Spacey seemed to be assault a 14-year-old. Furthermore, S grabbing on to the language of a movvement he’s long dismissed. For years, he repeatedly told interviewers he didn’t care to talk about his sexuality. When a 1997 profile in Esquire made much of his ““secret” private life, Spacey issued a statement saying he intended to maintain nal and personal life.” “a separation between his profession ony Awards, he merged More recently, as host of the 2017 To the two provocatively, making jokes suggesting he’d never come out.

That’s his right. But to come out aat the moment he was accused of child predation is particularly unseemly.

Not to mention it runs the risk of connecting what he may have done 31 years ago to one of the nastiest

‘I have loved and had romantic encounters with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man. I want to deal with this honestly and openly and that starts with examining my own behavior.’

THIS EPISODE BRINGS to mind the unfortunate case of former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey. Under fire for offenses not strictly related to his sexuality in 2004, McGreevey gave a speech in which he declared himself “a gay American” before resigning.

Being gay came to be seen as the reason that McGreevey had been subject to public criticism, even though it presumably had little to do with inappropriately appointing his lover to be the state’s homeland security adviser. Spacey seems to be operating from a playbook that didn’t quite work more than a decade ago.

It won’t now, either. For one thing, coming out has changed since 2004; the media and the general public have seen enough genuinely honest and open declarations of self to be able to pick up the whiff of self-interest that permeates Spacey’s long-deferred declaration.

Coming out is no longer novel enough to halt another, more important conversation.

And it’s that conversation that’s going to continue long after the surprise wears off of a “famously private” actor getting calculatedly personal. Spacey, attempting to benefit from society’s recent boom in inclusiveness, is instead running into the buzz saw sa of another recent, explosive trend. Bill Cosby.

Fox News. Harvey Weinstein. And all the rest. Allegations of seexual assault against public figures aree no longer an ancillary part of the storry, the thing we talk about for a whille before the movie gets released or tthe election mes out. They happens or the star com are the story. For so long unwilling to be a part of social change c around the LGBT community, Spaceyy’s now been wildlyy outpaced by ory. And coming histo out can’t keep him from being a part off that story now.

‘YOU CAN GO ON THE OFFENSE. YOU CAN BE THE DISRUPTER, INSTEAD OF THE DISRUPTED.’ —NEXT PAGE

A user prepares to take heroin on a New York City street in the South Bronx on Oct. 7

PUBLIC HEALTH

What doctors facing the opioid crisis need next

GE T T Y IMAGES

By Alice Park

PHOTOGR APH BY SPENCER PLATT

HOW DO YOU CONFRONT AN EPIDEMIC that has claimed more lives than the HIV/AIDS crisis at its peak? How do you counteract a system that incentivizes the flow of prescription painkillers from doctors to patients and ends up getting 3 million Americans addicted each year? And how do you reverse surging demand for prescription opioids’ illegal substitutes, which are more damaging and toxic but far cheaper and easier to obtain?

You could start by declaring a national public health emergency.

That’s what President Trump did on Oct. 26, creating a 90-day window during which federal agencies—from the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates prescription drugs; to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees guidelines for

treating addiction; to the Department of Justice, which is responsible for prosecuting illegal pill makers and drug dealers; to the National Institutes of Health, which studies how people first get addicted—must shift parts of their existing budgets to address the crisis.

After 90 days, the President can renew the emergency status to extend the intensified response.

This is a move in the right direction. But Trump’s order did not make additional funding immediately available, leading those on the front lines of the epidemic to ask what, exactly, it will mean. “Unfortunately, nothing,” says Michael Botticelli, executive director of the Grayken Center for Addiction Medicine at Boston Medical Center and former director of National Drug Control

The View

Policy in the Obama Administration. “There are no new grant dollars, no new policy initiatives.”

Days after Trump’s declaration, his official White House commission on the crisis issued its final report, which called for many of the initiatives that are backed by experts like Botticelli. The findings make it clear that current strategies and funding are far from adequate.

“What we need is something like the Ryan White Care Act,” says Dr. Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorders Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1990, Congress passed the act to provide funding for HIV patients who could not afford basic medical care and antiHIV drugs. With $2.3 billion at its disposal, the fund currently provides care to more than half of all people infected with the virus in the U.S. For the opioid epidemic, such additional funding would allow more people to receive medicationassisted treatment (MAT), which mimics opioids but has less addictive potential and can wean addicts off their dependence. Studies show that people given medications like methadone or buprenorphine are less likely to overdose or relapse.

Mandating that all health insurers cover substance-use-disorder treatment—as the Affordable Care Act does—would expand access to the medications and help reduce the stigma and controversy surrounding the practice of using drugs to treat drug addiction. But the Trump Administration’s reform efforts threaten to remove such coverage, most of which comes in the form of expanded Medicaid benefits. “If that’s taken away, then we’re back to square one,” says Cheryle Herr, clinical director for the Family Recovery Center in Liverpool, Ohio, which has been hit hard by the epidemic. “Our people are going to die.”

The commission also called for strengthening regulations that require any doctor who prescribes MAT to undergo additional training and certification each time they renew their medical license. Doctors argue that such stringent regulations already deter many from becoming eligible to prescribe MAT and that fewer physicians will be available to dispense the potentially lifesaving addiction treatments, leading to more overdoses and deaths.

The solutions need not come only from doctors, though. Despite the fact that addiction is a medical condition, it’s primarily dealt with by the criminaljustice system—a practice the commission wants to change. It advocated expanding drug courts, which give people the option to enter a recovery program rather than prison, to all 93 federal court jurisdictions in the U.S. It will be a long haul to end America’s opioid epidemic, a crisis that was decades in the making.

But at least we know where to take our first steps. □ TIME November 13, 2017

▶ For more on these stories, visit time.com/ideas

THE CEO BRIEF

Get ready for the new disrupters

By Alan Murray I was recently with a group of 100 CEOs gathered by IBM’s Ginni Rometty to discuss the “big bets” on the future being made by their companies. The session, which included top executives of companies in 17 different industries, representing $2 trillion in revenues, was off the record, so I can’t discuss specifics. But I can provide a few takeaways.

Rometty opened the session by suggesting the next wave of technology, unlike the last, is going to provide an advantage to legacy companies over digital startups. “I believe this is a ‘now’ moment for the incumbent companies,” she said. “You can go on the offense. You can be the disrupter, instead of the disrupted.” Many of the participating companies seemed to share her optimism, and a few provided stories of how they were doing just that.

The basis for their optimism?

Rometty posited that the first phase of the digital revolution favored a small number of platform giants that benefited from the network effect. The next phase is not about the network alone, but also about knowledge. That, she said, will

depend on proprietary data, as well as the expertise in the hands of companies like those in the room.

Those who use it wisely, with the help of AI, will win.

IBM’s Jon Iwata interviewed the 100 prior to the event, and gave a summary of some shared insights: • The group believes their companies’ core expertise is more important and more relevant than ever. Technology empowers that expertise.

• Data has become their most powerful asset (although turning that data into intelligence is still a critical challenge).

• Almost all of them are either building, or participating in, platforms, which are vital to their future.

Finally, the CEOs echoed a point I’ve heard repeatedly in the last few years: the biggest problem they face is not technology, but rather creating a culture that can embrace and adapt to technological change. As Iwata summarized their view: “Culture is the No. 1 impediment ... Culture moves in a linear way; technology moves exponentially.”

Murray is Time Inc.’s chief content officer and the president of Fortune

VERBATIM

‘A culture of collusion exists in the industry.’

GEORGE JEPSEN, Connecticut attorney general, announcing that 45 states and the District of Columbia will seek to accuse 18 generic drug manufacturers and subsidiaries of pricefixing 15 medicines, expanding a previous antitrust suit

▶ For more on these stories, visit time.com/ideas

BIG IDEA

A Middle Eastern museum made for the world

J E P S E N : A N D R E W H A R R E R — B L O O M B E R G /G E T T Y I M A G E S; R O M E T T Y: D AV I D B E C K E R — B L O O M B E R G /G E T T Y I M A G E S; B I G I D E A : M O H A M E D S O M J I — L O U V R E A B U D H A B I

Abu Dhabi’s own Louvre Museum (opening Nov. 11) has forgone its Parisian namesake’s famed pyramid for a dome inspired by mosque-crowning cupolas. Architect Jean Nouvel also mimicked the island’s palm-tree leaves by building the structure from eight perforated layers, making 7,850 starry openings—a “parasol creating a shower of lights” that protects people (and art) from the desert sun. But while the design is regional and the name is rented (on a 30-year contract), director Manuel Rabaté said he wants this Louvre to be the “world’s first universal museum.” The exhibits will encompass works from across the world and eschew the norm of grouping art by region. Instead, they’ll be organized by chronology and aesthetics to “stress our common values.” —Julia Zorthian

HISTORY

How civic pride grew a mustache NOVEMBER IS A TIME FOR CIVIC-MINDED men to participate in “Movember,” during which they grow mustaches to raise awareness and money for men’s health causes. But while this follicular fundraiser is a recent invention, it’s not the first time facial hair has served a public purpose in the U.S. In the 19th century, American men grew November ’staches to show support for something else: voting.

Because of the sex and age requirement for casting a ballot—only men who were at least 21 could do so—voting was often seen as a rite of passage for a young man. Growing an impressive beard or mustache before Election Day became a way for new voters to prove they were adults and not “beardless boys,” says historian Jon Grinspan, author of The Virgin Vote. An 1860 cartoon drawn to persuade these first-timers to support Abraham

Lincoln showed a man getting ready to cast his first vote and admiring his own mustache, exclaiming, “The horns are coming out under my nose bigger’n a tumble-bug’s!”

Young men excited to vote would often match their mustaches by dressing up in their best clothes and then celebrating the event by getting drunk for the first time, since liquor flowed freely at the polls. Such rituals began to fade when secret ballots were introduced in the late 1800s, making voting a solitary act. Many political scientists say the demise of voting as a community celebration contributed to decreasing turnout in the mid20th century. Nonetheless, it’s clear: growing a mustache has long been about making a statement. —OLIVIA B. WAXMAN ▶ For more on these stories, visit time.com/history

UP FOR DEBATE

SHOULD TEXTING AND WALKING BE ILLEGAL? On Oct. 25, Honolulu became the first major American city to make it illegal to text—or look down at any electronic device—while crossing the street. The hope is to help solve a growing but unaddressed scourge: distracted walking.

The problem has been apparent for years. A 2013 study found that more than 1,500 pedestrians were treated in hospitals in 2010 for injuries related to walking with a mobile device—exceeding those hospitalized because of distracted driving—although 9.1% were texting, while 69.5% were talking.

That does not include those who refused treatment or died; the expected overall total is much higher.

In 2011, legislators in Rexburg, Idaho, passed an ordinance similar to Honolulu’s— even though measures in Illinois, New Jersey and Stamford, Conn., have not succeeded.

Citizens have criticized the nanny-state nature of the laws. But Debbie Hersman, president of the National Safety Council, argues that drunk-driving fatalities declined only after strict laws were introduced, and other car-safety measures have become natural.

She asks, “When you wear a seat belt, do you feel like any of your rights are being taken away from you?”

—Samantha Cooney

World

President Xi Jinping told delegates at the party congress that it was time for China to take “center stage”

ADVANTAGE CHINA

PHOTOGR APH BY FIRST LASTNAME FOR TIME

CHINA’S STATE-DOMINATED ECONOMY IS BUILT TO WIN THE FUTURE

BY IAN BREMMER

PRESIDENT TRUMP HAS PLENTY OF work to do during his 10-day tour of Asia in November. In Japan and South Korea, he must reassure nervous allies that an “America first” foreign policy does not mean the U.S. has ceded regional dominance to China. In Vietnam and the Philippines, he has to communicate deep U.S. interest in balancing China’s influence in Southeast Asia.

But the most important stop will be in Beijing, where Trump will meet President Xi Jinping for the first time since the Chinese leader heralded a “new era” in global politics at his pivotal party congress in October. Trump will try to project strength while calling for closer cooperation on North Korea and on resolving trade disputes. But he arrives at a moment when China, not the U.S., is the single most powerful actor in the global economy.

The Chinese authoritarian-capitalist model wasn’t supposed to survive in a global free market, let alone thrive.

As recently as five years ago, there was consensus that China would one day need fundamental political reform for the state to maintain its legitimacy and that China could not sustain its state capitalist system. Today China’s political and economic system is better equipped and perhaps even more sustainable than the American model, which has dominated the international system since the end of World War II. While the U.S. economy remains the world’s largest, China’s ability to use state-owned companies to boost the party’s domestic and foreign influence ensures that the emerging giant is on track to surpass U.S. GDP in 2029, PHOTOGR APH BY NG HAN GUAN

according to the Center for Economics and Business Research.

The U.S. is hardly irrelevant. The dollar remains the global reserve currency, an exorbitant privilege that will likely last for years to come. Wealthy Chinese continue to invest in U.S. real estate and send their kids to U.S. schools. But the pillars of U.S. power—its military alliances, its trade leadership and its willingness to promote Western political values—are eroding.

At the same time, the leaders of other emerging powers—not just Russia but also democracies like India and Turkey— are following China’s lead in building systems where government embraces commerce while tightening control over domestic politics, economic competition and control of information. This process has been in motion for many years, but China now has its strongest leader in decades, and the U.S. has its weakest.

Americans and Europeans have always assumed that the long arc of human development bends toward liberal democracy. What if they’re wrong?

THERE’S AN OLD, likely apocryphal story that, during a visit to China several decades ago, economist and free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman visited a site where workers were building a canal.

When he asked his host why the workers were using shovels and wheelbarrows rather than modern equipment like tractors, he was told that the project’s purpose was to create jobs. If it’s jobs you want, Friedman asked, why not give the workers spoons instead of shovels?

Times have changed since then, but not all that much—the reality remains that it is far easier for Xi to command Chinese officials to create and protect jobs than, for example, it was for Barack Obama to persuade Republican lawmakers to bail out the U.S. auto industry in the wake of the U.S. financial crisis. Beijing offers direct financial and political support for its strategic industries, 365 days a year. The government protects Chinese companies charged with stealing the intellectual property of foreign firms. It provides direct funding for strategic sectors. It writes laws designed specifically to help them grow. And it engages in industrial espionage and cyberattacks against foreign competitors.

This level of protection is especially TIME November 13, 2017

important in an age when the most important variables globally will be the pace and scale of technological change.

Automation has already upended labor demographics in the developed world; 87.8% of manufacturing jobs lost in the U.S. between 2000 and 2010 were the result of automation and improved technology, according to a 2015 study

by Ball State University. Technological upheaval is now poised to displace hundreds of millions of workers in the developing world, including many who have only recently risen from poverty.

But the Chinese government’s finer control of its economy will help absorb some of the shock that will have bigger effects elsewhere.

Take China’s big three oil companies.

CNOOC, PetroChina and Sinopec have each benefitted from large infusions of cash from the state via state-owned banks. Similarly, the heavily indebted state-owned chemical giant ChemChina was able to acquire Swiss firm Syngenta and its biotech assets for $43 billion only because the Chinese government made clear that food security in China is a strategic priority—and that the state would guarantee ChemChina’s financial stability. Private firms benefit too. Telecoms firm Huawei is poised to dominate the global deployment of fifth-generation mobile infrastructure, particularly in developing countries, thanks to a hefty credit line from China Development Bank, which lends in support of the Chinese government’s policy agenda. Trump can only envy the Chinese government’s ability to use policy and subsidy to decide which companies will win and which will lose—and the power that that reflects on the ruling party.

But jobs and industry are not the only ways that China’s leaders ensure political unity. They also use technology to bolster the ruling party’s political control in ways

CHINA, NOT THE U.S., IS THE GLOBAL ECONOMY’S SINGLE MOST POWERFUL ACTOR

that Western governments can’t. As we embark on the world’s biggest social experiment ever—entire generations interacting with society primarily through smartphones—we’ll see enormous power for institutions that have the means to control those interactions and the data they produce.

In the West, companies use algorithms to expand profitability, while citizens use them to become better-informed consumers. In China, companies use algorithms at the behest of the government to ensure that citizens remain within the rules of order set by the political leadership. There is no better example of this than the “social credit system” that China is developing, a system that allows state officials to assess a person’s financial data, social connections, consumption habits and respect for the law to establish the citizen’s “trustworthiness.”

Imagine a credit report that reveals whether you’ve ever committed a crime, been caught cheating on a test, been drunk in public, missed an alimony payment, been fired from a job, signed a petition, visited undesirable websites, been photographed at a protest or written something on the Internet that led administrators to question your loyalty to the state. A good social credit score could lead to a promotion, a raise, a better apartment, admission to a good school, access to state-approved dating websites, better stores, better doctors, the right to travel, a more generous pension and important opportunities for your children. A bad score could put you in jail.

The potential for intrusion into 1.4 billion personal lives is unprecedented.

Published information on the plan by China’s State Council says it is intended as a safeguard against, among other things, “conduct that seriously undermines . . . the normal social order” and “assembling to disrupt social order [and] endangering national defense interests.” The plan’s ultimate purpose, according to Chinese officials, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” For Westerners, this is a shocking abuse of state power and an unthinkable invasion of personal privacy.

In China, these are the tools officials will use to build a more “harmonious society.”

China’s largest dating site, Baihe, already

P R E V I O U S PA G E S : A P/ R E X /S H U T T E R S T O C K ; T H I S PA G E : F R E D D U F O U R — P O O L / R E U T E R S

allows users to display their credit scores in their dating profiles.

But China’s most important ambitions are in artificial intelligence. This is the space race of the 21st century, but one with a much more direct impact on the lives and livelihoods of citizens. The biggest technological breakthroughs in AI will demand the kind of planning and investment that the U.S. once poured into the Manhattan Project or the race to the moon. However, the U.S. government no longer has the political will to muster this kind of sustained long-term commitment and has outsourced innovation to Silicon Valley. U.S. tech firms will have the advantage if the race to develop AI depends mainly on experimentation and innovation in multiple areas at once.

But China is the better bet to win if the decisive factor is depth of commitment to a single goal and the depth of pockets in pursuing it. The one certainty here is that Washington—and the representative democracy and free-market capitalism it champions—is not in the race.

To argue that China’s system is better able to withstand the shocks of today’s world is not to claim that it’s better for those who live within it. Political repression and the lack of rule of law in China create injustice at every level of society. As local governments and companies in China struggle with debt, the state’s ability to bail them out is not inexhaustible. Despite its investments in new technologies, automation and machine learning will displace large numbers of Chinese workers over time, creating long-term risks of social unrest.

But for the foreseeable future, China is likely to remain strong and stable. Its international presence will continue to grow, and it is not short of ambition. In October, Xi said it was time for China to “take center stage in the world.”

The China striding into that spotlight is not guaranteed to win the future. In this fragmenting world, no one government will have the international influence required to continue to set the political and economic rules that govern the global system. But if you had to bet on one country that is best positioned today to extend its influence with partners and rivals alike, you wouldn’t be wise to back the U.S. The smart money would probably be on China. □

COUNTERPOINT

XI JINPING’S DILEMMA

President Xi’s consolidation of power is a recipe for paralysis

BY RICHARD HAASS

On the surface, it would seem to be China’s moment. The economy continues to grow at a healthy clip, a new leadership is firmly ensconced in the aftermath of the just concluded party congress, and the country is filling some of the strategic space left vacant by a United States that is increasingly disinterested in trade pacts and global leadership.

But as is often the case, appearances can be deceiving. Economic growth has slowed (probably more than official statistics indicate), and some of the growth that exists stems from government subsidies of state-owned enterprises that would otherwise likely fail.

As a result, China’s debt is reaching dangerous levels. Efforts to generate more consumer demand and make employment less dependent on access to foreign markets is proving difficult.

Much of the low-hanging fruit, including moving people from rural to urban areas, has been picked. Making things tougher is that stability has taken precedence over reform; China’s leaders want the economic benefits of an open society without the political risks. This is easier said than done.

Speaking of politics, President Xi Jinping enjoys power on a scale rivaled only by former leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. But this concentration of power has its downsides. It is not just that succession (and long-term stability) is an open question. It is also the lack of meaningful checks and balances.

Any errors by Xi are likely to persist.

And there is the likelihood that almost

all decisions will require Xi’s personal involvement as officials fear getting crosswise with their boss. This is a recipe for paralysis.

This is highly relevant, given that Xi faces a daunting inbox. In addition to economic challenges, there is the reality of an aging society, serious air and water pollution, increased inequality and persistent corruption, despite an official campaign to stamp it out.

Chinese foreign policy also faces hurdles, beginning with North Korea.

China is unwilling to use all the leverage at its disposal for fear it would destabilize the status quo. But this means risking either a war or a region in which other countries acquire nuclear weapons; the former would be an economic disaster, the latter a strategic one. Meanwhile, problems with other neighbors, wary of China’s strength, are likely to multiply.

All of which suggests Xi’s dilemma.

He may be tempted to turn to a more assertive foreign policy as an alternative way to demonstrate the party’s legitimacy and right to rule. But in so doing he could jeopardize the stability that has contributed so directly to China’s economic growth. The only thing that is certain is that the future of China is much less assured than commonly assumed.

Haass is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of A World in Disarray

World

Travelers pass through the train station in Kashgar, China’s westernmost city, in May 2016 PHOTOGR APHS BY PATRICK WACK

THE NEW

CHINA ANNOUNCES ITS INTENTION TO LEAD THE WORLD BY BUILDING ALMOST EVERYWHERE ON IT

SILK ROAD

BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL/KHORGOS

ON CHINA’S REMOTE WESTERN FRONtier with Kazakhstan, yurts and camels silhouette against a piercing blue sky.

Yet the most striking image rising from the desert is an entirely new city. Founded four years ago, Khorgos is poised to become the world’s busiest inland port, a vital link in China’s epochal plan to re-create the Silk Road.

There’s a free-trade zone that welcomes 30,000 traders daily and an industrial complex of factories where manufacturers enjoy perks like two years of free rent courtesy of the Chinese government. At the customs gate, trucks line up stacked with agricultural equipment and huge cross sections of blue industrial piping as bleary-eyed drivers chain-smoke out of the cab windows. “Today the ground of Khorgos is mud,” says Guo Jianbin, deputy director of the Khorgos Economic Development Zone administration committee, accenting his words with a booted stamp. “But soon it will be paved with gold.”

Khorgos is a linchpin in Chinese TIME November 13, 2017

△ A technician from a state-owned oilexploration team rests after lunch in the Taklamakan Desert in December

President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. Formerly known as One Belt One Road, it’s a rekindling of the ancient Silk Road through a staggeringly ambitious plan to build a network of highways, railways, ports and pipelines linking Asia via the Middle East to Europe and south to Africa. The land “belt” takes cargo, in large part via Khorgos, through Eurasia. A maritime “road” links coastal Chinese cities via a series of ports to Africa and the Mediterranean.

In all, 900 projects have been earmarked at a cost of $900 billion, according to the China Development Bank. There’s the $480 million Lamu deep-sea port in Kenya, which will eventually be connected via road, railway and pipeline to landlocked South Sudan and Ethiopia and right across Africa to Cameroon’s port of Douala. A new $7.3 billion pipeline from

Turkmenistan will bring China an extra 15 billion cubic meters of gas annually.

Not since the hordes of Genghis Khan galloped west in the 13th century has China harbored such sweeping transnational ambitions—although this time, instead of ashes and sun-bleached bones, it plans to leave harbors, pipelines and high-speed rail in its wake. “Exchange will replace estrangement, mutual learning will replace clashes, and co-existence will replace a sense of superiority,” Xi told the opening of the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in May. It’s a vision of inclusive globalization that bolsters Chinese leadership credentials at a time when the U.S. is wavering on its international commitments. Belt and Road aims to reach 65 countries, covering 70% of the planet’s population, three-quarters of its energy resources, a quarter of goods and services and 28% of global GDP—some $21 trillion.

Beijing’s rationale is clear: there are large, resource-rich nations within its reach, with a severe infrastructure deficit, and

China has the resources to bind them to it.

By boosting connectivity, China can spur growth, gain access to valuable natural resources and create new markets for its goods. In March, China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan said Chinese firms had already contributed 180,000 jobs and nearly $1.1 billion in tax revenue along the Belt and Road. Increasing numbers of Chinese engineers, crane operators and steel smelters stand to reap the benefits of maturing projects. “You’ll have a China that really sits at the beating heart strategically and economically of this most important part of the world,” says professor Nick Bisley, an Asia expert at Australia’s La Trobe University.

For Xi, that’s the rightful position of the world’s most populous nation and its second biggest economy after the U.S. China’s recent history has lurched from quasicolonization to devastating war and then collectivized economic turmoil, poverty and political strife. No longer. Today Chinese companies own storied European soccer teams, a major

△ Downtown Karamay, an oil city that has sprung up in recent decades in northern Xinjiang

Hollywood film studio and New York City’s Waldorf Astoria hotel. China has the most solar panels, wind turbines and high-speed rail in the world. When, in January, Xi became the first Chinese leader to address the World Economic Forum in Davos, he presented an image of a confident, globalist, responsible power helping to set international rules of trade and environmental standards.

IN ALL, 900 PROJECTS HAVE BEEN EARMARKED AT A COST OF $900 BILLION

Opening the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party on Oct. 18, Xi announced, “It is time for us to take center stage in the world.”

THIS VISION CONTRASTS starkly with U.S. President Donald Trump, who can’t pass his $1 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges and electricity grid, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans recognize the need. Trump’s nixing of American involvement in the TransPacific Partnership trade agreement has weakened the U.S. as a Pacific power, and his announcement of the U.S.’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord left the world looking to China for leadership.

Restoring the lost grandeur of the Silk Road has myriad challenges, of course, chiefly the questionable economics of pouring millions of dollars into some of the world’s poorest and least stable nations. Falling commodity prices have undermined some projects, while others are vulnerable to shifting political

THE REACH winds in host countries. The scale of the challenge is evident in Khorgos, through which trains now chug on a 7,000-mile journey from 27 Chinese manufacturing hubs to 11 cities in Europe. It’s the world’s longest international freight line, broadly following the path of the old Silk Road caravans that lugged pistachios, ivory and dates to eager markets in the West. Guo says that 2,050 cargo trains passed by Khorgos last year, and he is confident that the goal of 5,000 for 2017 is achievable.

Khorgos sits on the edge of the Taklamakan Desert. The land is so inhospitable that it is nicknamed the Sea of Death. Herodotus wrote in his Histories that griffins guarded golden treasure at the craggy northern extreme and that the North Wind gushed from one of its mountain caves. It remains one of the most remote spots on earth: Khorgos lies just 100 miles from the Eurasian pole of inaccessibility—the farthest point on earth from any ocean.

Today the Taklamakan fills part of China’s westernmost autonomous region of Xinjiang, which borders seven Central and South Asian nations and is thus the central hub for Belt and Road’s land portion. A total of 3,500 miles of the ancient Silk Road passes through this Alaskasize territory, where the Taklamakan’s dunes to the south are separated from a lush northern prairie by a central spine of meringue-peaked mountains.

But Xinjiang is also China’s most volatile region, prone to convulsions of strife from a predominantly ethnic Uighur Muslim population that feels marginalized and persecuted under Beijing’s rule. Riots in the provincial capital of Urumqi in 2009 left 197 dead, according to official figures.

Security is suffocating. To take a train at the Urumqi’s railway station requires negotiating four ranks of X-ray machines and metal detectors. At the city’s central bazaar, soldiers stand next to armored cars with bayonets affixed to assault rifles as live lambs are carried blinking past trays of mutton into butcher shops.

It’s China’s only province without 4G cellphone coverage, which, say officials, has been deliberately held up to impede the download of jihadi propaganda.

Even in the Belt and Road showpiece of Khorgos, the Chinese government holds “stability” to be paramount, despite the effect of chilling the proTIME November 13, 2017

China is connecting itself to the world by helping fund hundreds of Belt and Road infrastructure projects across Eurasia and Africa

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SOURCE: MERCATOR INSTITUTE FOR CHINA STUDIES

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business atmosphere. In the especially restive south, Uighurs must secure official permission just to travel to neighboring villages. Many feel development isn’t inclusive. “Things were better before,” says a Uighur taxi driver in Khorgos, whose name TIME has withheld for his own security. “In the winter, I would hunt wild turkey. In the summer, I picked berries. We don’t need all this.” Security is not just a domestic issue. Pipelines and dams in Myanmar, ports in West Africa and hydroelectricity plants and copper mines in Afghanistan could all be held ransom to strife. Last year, Chinese railway workers in Kenya were attacked by locals who said the new arrivals had been unfairly prioritized for jobs. China may feel compelled to expand its military presence in trouble spots, shifting the global security architecture away from the U.S. In August, China opened its first overseas military base, in Djibouti, and it

now contributes more U.N. peacekeepers than the other four permanent Security Council members combined. “Security is the most important challenge facing Belt and Road,” says Zhu Feng, dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Nanjing University.

ECONOMIC QUESTIONS also plague many aspects of the initiative. Moving goods to Europe by rail through Khorgos is two to three times the cost of sea freight, with twice the carbon footprint, while only cutting transport times from eastern Chinese factories to Europe in half—18 days, compared with 35 by sea.

Few goods would benefit from this timesaving for the extra cost: perishable fruit and pharmaceuticals are flown by air to minimize spoilage, and electronics and household wares are dispatched by the cheapest method possible to maximize profits.

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Beijing

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ANGLADE

SRI LANKA Hambantota

Silk Road

A cargo ship unloads freight in Hambantota, Sri Lanka

MALAYSIA SINGAPORE

Indian Ocean

A D D I S A B A B A : I M A G I N E C H I N A /A P ; K H O R G O S : PAT R I C K W A C K ; S R I L A N K A : L A K R U W A N W A N N I A R A C H C H I — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S

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Chinese tourists taking a tour of the border city of Khorgos

I N D O N E S I A Jakarta

Compounding matters, while China sends clothes, electronics and building materials through Khorgos to the West, those same “cargo trains are coming back empty,” says the official Guo. Europe isn’t a cost-effective destination, and the economies of Central Asia are weak. At the Khorgos free-trade zone, only 10% of traders come from Kazakhstan. While the Chinese browse mink furs, Georgian red wine and Siberian honey, the Kazakhs queue for rust-bucket minibuses clutching plastic chairs, cheap bedding and counterfeit sneakers. “Ninety-nine percent of our customers are Chinese,” says Lian Gang, the manager of a duty-free shop in the trade zone.

Xi’s personal patronage of Belt and Road means many questionable projects are getting the green light. A new railway through landlocked Laos, for example, is set to cost $7 billion—about half of the country’s GDP. Some 70% is to be funded

by Chinese investment with the rest paid for by the Laotian government, largely through loans provided by a consortium of Chinese state banks. The isolated nation of 7 million will never be a competitive manufacturing hub. According to Erica Downs, a China specialist at nonprofit research and analysis organization CNA,

who has spent four years researching the initiative, “If you can link whatever you are doing to Belt and Road, even if it’s a tenuous connection, there’s still a chance of securing financial support.”

State Chinese banks are obliged to support government initiatives with lowinterest loans. Wary bankers have started referring to “One Belt One Trap.”

When Xi first announced the initiative in Almaty in 2013, commodity prices were at historic highs. But they have fallen precipitously. China is, of course, big enough to metabolize a few white elephants. Its meteoric rise over the past three decades was engineered on exactly this massive statechampioned approach to financing.

China has the resources: its GDP was $11.2 trillion last year, with growth at a slowing though healthy 6.7% and a trade surplus of $48.5 billion in August. The combined funds allocated to the Belt and Road Initiative from the Silk Road Fund, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), New Development Bank, China Development Bank, ExportImport Bank of China and the nation’s humanitarian aid budget add up to $269 billion. The rest of the estimated $900 billion for the initiative must

come via private Chinese banks and contributions by host countries. Beijing has enormous centralized power to get things done, including offering myriad incentives for business that embrace Belt and Road. Still, there are dangers.

“The Chinese are very possibly taking on commitments that will exceed their ability to fund in a period of dramatically slowing growth,” says Scott W. Harold, a China expert for the Rand Corp.

Ultimately, though, it might not matter whether most projects offer substantial returns. Infrastructure is inherently a positive, regardless of whether its financiers handsomely recoup their investment. Roads, bridges and tunnels link communities and boost commerce.

The Asian Development Bank says Asia needs $26 trillion of infrastructure through 2030, or $1.7 billion per year.

Try telling rural Indonesians that a new power plant, which will let their children study into the night, is a bad idea. Or Sudanese farmers that the road or railway that will take their crops to market is an expensive folly. Many Belt and Road countries are so poor that even a tiny injection of capital can make a massive difference to livelihoods.

ABOVE ALL, the New Silk Road is a geopolitical gambit. The Chinese-financed Hambantota Port in southern Sri Lanka has been vastly underused since it opened in 2010, prompting the Colombo government in July to sell a 70% stake to staterun China Merchants Port Holdings for $1.1 billion. But India is worried that the port could be used to host Chinese naval vessels. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is about befriending Pakistan so it stops extremists from seeping over into Xinjiang. The AIIB, a Beijingheadquartered multilateral development bank, was established in 2016 to fund Belt and Road projects but also to show the world that China could run a real, multilateral development bank according to international standards. In an augury of the shifting world order, despite Washington’s fierce campaign to stop

nations from joining, few listened to the naysaying, and 80 nations are members, including staunch U.S. allies Australia and Britain. “When the Chinese government proposed the idea, there was some misunderstanding and some questions and even suspicions,” AIIB president Jin Liqun tells TIME in his Beijing office.

“Misunderstanding is understandable.

It takes time for people to appreciate the concept.”

TIME November 13, 2017

CREDIT HERE

AMERICA REMAINS IN DENIAL about what Belt and Road really signifies. In a June report, the State Department commented that the Initiative’s freetrade zones “only offer a degree of [liberalization] comparable to other opportunities in other parts of China” and not much else. The U.S. sent a lowlevel delegation to the May forum in Beijing. Chinese state media reported in June that Trump told a senior Beijing official he was open to cooperating on the initiative, though the White House wouldn’t confirm those remarks. Then, on Oct. 3, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis criticized the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor for passing through disputed Kashmir, parroting India’s objections. “In a globalized world, there are many belts and many roads, and no one nation should put itself into a position of dictating ‘one belt, one road,’” Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee during a congressional hearing.

The new Silk Road is the purest illustration of Beijing’s expanding influence as Washington is consumed with partisan bickering and fumbles for a coherent foreign policy. China has wrapped an amorphous group of projects into a tidy package that speaks to inclusiveness, cooperation and altruism: as a green leader, despite being the planet’s worst polluter; as a champion of free trade and investment, despite wreathing its economy in protectionist red tape; as a good guy, despite acting as an authoritarian state that is a serial violator of human rights.

In Khorgos, this is no desert mirage, but a reality of steel and concrete, diesel fumes and plastic wrapping. “The next step is to diversify our capabilities: information, logistics, financial and an airport,” says the official Guo. “And also tourism.” Big dreams for a small city that has its sights set on both East and West. 

CREDIT HERE

A truck motors along the Karakoram Highway, linking China and Pakistan

PHOTOGR APH BY JOHN MINCHILLO

Nation

TRUMP’S MUELLER PROBLEM WHY THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S FIRST INDICTMENTS SIGNAL TROUBLE FOR THE PRESIDENT

BY MOLLY BALL

President Trump waves after speaking at a rally in Louisville, Ky., on March 20

The fateful morning began like so many others in the White House residence.The President turned on the television and started to stew.The news was about him, and it was brutal: indictments, Russia, that terrible special counsel.

TIMELINE OF THE INVESTIGATION The indictment of former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and the guilty plea of former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos offer a fuller picture of the alleged ties between the President’s campaign and people connected to the Russian government. Here’s a timeline of key events, according to federal documents released on Oct. 30 and other publicly available records:

WHO’S WHO INTHE RUSSIA PROBE

= indicted

GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS Former campaign adviser Pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his attempts to set up meetings with Russian officials

TIME November 13, 2017

MARCH 21, 2016 Trump announces that Papadopoulos has joined his campaign as a foreign policy adviser.

From his lonely bubble at the center of it all, Donald Trump watched and raged. “Sorry, but this is years ago,” he announced to the world. “Also, there is NO COLLUSION!” The ritual may have been familiar: the angry tweets, the isolated, obsessed President. But no cries of “Fake news!” could shake the sense, on the morning of Oct. 30, that this time the Trump presidency was entering a new and dangerous phase.

No amount of distraction or deflection could alter the hard fact of the first criminal charges. Up until now, the Russia scandal has been an ambient hum of speculation and innuendo. Now it’s a legal case.

With the indictments of two top former campaign aides to the President and the guilty plea of a third former adviser, the specter that shadowed the Administration from the start has become a reality. It was all there in the 12-count indictment, headlined by the charge of “Conspiracy Against the United States.”

The one-two punch thrown by special counsel Robert Mueller knocked out any remaining hope Trump might have had that the Russia investigation would fizzle. To the contrary, the indictment of Paul Manafort, Trump’s onetime campaign chairman,

APRIL 26, 2016 Papadopoulos meets a “professor” in London, who tells him that the Russian government has “dirt” on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands of emails.”

Papadopoulos then attempts to arrange meetings between the Trump campaign and Kremlin-linked officials.

MAY 19, 2016 Manafort, brought on in March to lead the Trump campaign’s effort to corral Republican delegates at the convention, becomes campaign chairman.

MAY 21, 2016 At Papadopoulos’ request, Trump campaign officials discuss the possibility of visiting Russia to meet with government officials. In an email exchange, one Trump campaign official notes that “someone low level” should make the trip, rather than Trump, “so as not to send any signal.”

VIKTOR YANUKOVYCH

“THE PROFESSOR”

PAUL MANAFORT

RICK GATES

Unnamed liaison Linked Papadopoulos to Russian nationals, including a Foreign Ministry official and another Russian woman

Former campaign chairman Charged on nine counts of conspiracy, money laundering and acting as an unregistered agent for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine

Former deputy campaign manager Manafort’s business partner and deputy on the Trump campaign was also indicted on eight charges

Former Ukraine President Led the Party of Regions, the proRussia political party for which Manafort worked for years

P R E V I O U S PA G E : A P/ R E X /S H U T T E R S T O C K ; PA PA D O P O U L O S , M A N A F O R T, YA N U K O V YC H , K I S LYA K , V E S E L N I T S K AYA , K U S H N E R , F LY N N , S E S S I O N S : G E T T Y I M A G E S (8); G AT E S: A P/ R E X /S H U T T E R S T O C K ; PA G E : E PA / R E X /S H U T T E R S T O C K

alleges that the President’s campaign was run, for a crucial period, by a foreign agent who had worked on behalf of a Putin-friendly regime. Manafort, the court filings charged, laundered tens of millions of dollars and evaded taxes while serving as an unregistered bagman for the political operation of the Russian-aligned Ukrainian strongman Viktor Yanukovych.

And then he went to work for Trump.

Even after Manafort was pushed out of the campaign, his business partner Rick Gates, who was also indicted, remained in Trump’s orbit.

If that wasn’t damaging enough, the surprise guilty plea of former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos shattered Trump’s claim that his campaign never sought to collude with Russia. Papadopoulos admitted to lying to the FBI about his efforts to set up meetings with Kremlin-connected sources dangling “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as senior campaign officials egged

JUNE 9, 2016 Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Manafort meet Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-linked lawyer who claims to have damaging intel on Clinton.

JULY 22, 2016 WikiLeaks publishes thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee.

U.S. intelligence agencies later conclude that the hack was perpetrated by Russian operatives.

him on, according to court documents.

If it turns out that Papadopoulos didn’t manage to collude with the Russians, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Mueller’s opening gambit struck at two of Trump’s most sensitive spots.

The indictments of Manafort and Gates, for crimes like tax evasion and fraud suggest that Mueller is following the money, digging up old financial records—potentially the tax returns that Trump has sought to shield. And Papadopoulos’ alleged work with Russia inflames at Trump’s fear of having his election win delegitimized. Worst of all for the President, the filings paint a broad and damning picture of where the probe may be heading—a process over which Trump has no control. “Now we’ve seen the iceberg,” says a Republican operative.

“The question is what’s below the water line.”

The charges sketched a troubling portrait of a Russian influence operation that

AUG. 19, 2016 Manafort resigns from the Trump campaign after coming under fire for his past lobbying work on behalf of the Party of Regions, a proRussia political party in Ukraine.

DEC., 2016 Kushner and Michael Flynn meet with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak to establish “a line of communication” between the Trump Administration and the Kremlin.

had penetrated the American electoral system from multiple angles. The Russians sought out low-level players like Papadopoulos. They had an in with senior officials like Manafort and Gates.

They hacked and strategically released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. And they executed a far-reaching social-media campaign of bots and trolls and fake news: in recent congressional hearings, Facebook representatives testified that Russian disinformation reached a number of people equal to half of all eligible voters in 2016—but that the company didn’t realize the extent of the effort until long after the election was over.

If the goal of Russia’s election-meddling effort in 2016, as U.S. intelligence experts testified, was to sow chaos and undermine American democracy, then it’s clear that the operation is still succeeding, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

JAN. 27, 2017 During an interview with the FBI, Papadopoulos makes false and misleading statements about the nature and timing of his Russian-linked contacts, according to his guilty plea.

MAY 17, 2017 Special counsel Robert Mueller is selected to lead an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election.

NOV. 8, 2016: ELECTION DAY

SERGEY KISLYAK Russian ambassador Had contact with several campaign officials; the Washington Post reported that Trump disclosed classified ISIS intel to Kislyak

NATALIA VESELNITSKAYA Russian lawyer Participated in a meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort

JARED KUSHNER

CARTER PAGE

MICHAEL FLYNN

JEFF SESSIONS

Senior adviser and son-in-law Met with Kislyak and Veselnitskaya, and failed to disclose Russian contacts during his nationalsecurity clearance process

Former campaign adviser Held meetings with Russian nationals and also gave a speech in Moscow criticizing U.S. foreign policy toward Russia

Former National Security Adviser Forced to resign after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with Kislyak

Attorney General Recused himself from the Justice Department’s Russia probe after failing to disclose meetings with Kislyak, paving the way for Mueller’s appointment

Manafort, the President’s former campaign chairman, was indicted on nine charges including conspiracy against the U.S.

▽ AT THE WHITE HOUSE, staffers reacted to the revelations with concern but not panic. “They’re used to being at the center of the storm. They’ve got pretty thick skin at this point,” says a GOP consultant with ties to the White House. “Nobody knows where this is going, but they’re not naive.

It’s hard to see this just stopping with one person.” Anyone who couldn’t tolerate this level of risk doesn’t work there anymore, or wouldn’t work there in the first place. With the firings and departures of heavyweights like Stephen Bannon, only a handful of yes-men in the building remain loyal to the President above all. Besides those few, the ex-aide says, “he’s surrounded by people who don’t like him.” And people whom he does not fully trust. The President, a former campaign aide says, is feeling “boxed in.” Trump always seems able to escape his political predicaments, no matter how seemingly dire. But the law is a different matter.

Mueller’s net may never fall squarely on the President, who has not himself been implicated in any wrongdoing. In responding to the news, the White House even claimed a measure of vindication, pointing out that Manafort’s alleged crimes were unconnected to his work with Trump, and that Papadopoulos was a relative nobody who was caught redhanded. It’s doubtful that any of this will damage Trump’s rapport with the Republican right. Among his base, a longdebunked allegation about the Clinton Foundation and a uranium company was being treated as the real scandal, along with the recent revelation that the Clinton campaign helped bankroll the notorious secret dossier alleging Trump’s ties to Russia. Bannon and other operatives are moving to cement Trump’s ownership of the GOP by bullying lawmakers who stand up to the President and directing voters’ anger at common enemies.

On Capitol Hill, the President’s

‘NOBODY KNOWS WHERE THIS IS GOING, BUT THEY’RE NOT NAIVE. IT’S HARD TO SEE THIS JUST STOPPING WITH ONE PERSON.’ A GOP CONSULTANT WITH TIES TO THE WHITE HOUSE

TIME November 13, 2017

THE FALL OF PAUL MANAFORT

BY SIMON SHUSTER/KIEV AND PHILIP ELLIOTT/WASHINGTON

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, PAUL MANAFORT RODE HIGH. He bought homes and furnished them with pricey antiques and carpets. He paid for much of it using millions of dollars in undeclared overseas bank accounts, money he had made advising Ukrainian allies of Vladimir Putin, according to charges filed against him by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Manafort had earned it, in a way. When he went to work in Ukraine in 2005, his primary task was to burnish the image of a presidential hopeful named Viktor Yanukovych.

Yanukovych had the backing of the Kremlin but was oafish and inarticulate, and had served jail time in his youth for theft and battery in his gritty home region of Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine. Manafort’s job, in the words of a U.S. embassy cable sent from Kiev to Washington in 2006, was to give an “extreme makeover” to Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, which the cable referred to as “a haven for Donetsk-based mobsters.”

Yanukovych and Putin were determined to stop Ukraine’s accelerating move away from Russia toward alliances with the

MARK PE TERSON — REDUX

West. With guidance from Manafort and backing from Moscow, the Party of Regions made astonishing progress over the next five years, culminating in Yanukovych’s successful bid for the presidency in 2010. Among his first official acts was to legally bar Ukraine from seeking NATO membership.

Among his unofficial ones were to amass an enormous fortune and launch a crackdown against political opponents. “It’s normal practice,” Yanukovych told TIME in June 2012, in reference to his jailing of an opposition leader. “Today the President of Ukraine has the highest ratings of any politician,” he added.

Manafort continued to earn money from Yanukovych and his allies for several more years as

the country descended into conflict. After a pro-Western uprising forced Yanukovych from power in 2014, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau discovered a secret ledger of off-the-books payments from the Party of Regions. Manafort’s name appears in the document 22 times, with payments worth $12.7 million designated for him between 2007 and 2012. Manafort has denied receiving any illicit funds.

Even after the revolution of 2014 turned violent, with police shooting dozens of protesters in the streets of Kiev, Manafort continued to assist his Ukrainian patrons.

He helped the party rebrand itself after its leaders were blamed for the bloodshed, which ultimately took more than 100 lives. But the gig was coming to an end; Yanukovych and his closest allies fled in February 2014 to Russia, where Putin guaranteed their security. After the Party of Regions broke apart in the fall of the same year, Manafort advised some of its former members on how to win seats in the postrevolutionary parliament. Fortunately for him, just as his Ukrainian cash cow was drying up, new opportunities were on the way.

Manafort came to the attention of Trump’s insurgent campaign in March 2016, just as some Republican Party operatives were looking to block a Trump nomination by peeling off delegates at the nominating convention in Cleveland. The prospect of the first convention floor fight since the 1976 brawl between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan boosted Manafort’s credentials: he had played a role in that battle, helping the Ford camp stifle Reagan.

But just who is responsible

for bringing Manafort on board remains something of a mystery. At least three versions are offered by sources in Trump’s orbit. In one, Trump son-in-law and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner proposed Manafort. Ivanka Trump’s husband saw troubles ahead at the convention and urged his father-in-law to enlist someone who knew the rules. Tom Barrack, a longtime Trump pal and fellow billionaire, may also have played a role, passing on Manafort’s memos to

JUST WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR BRINGING MANAFORT ON BOARD REMAINS SOMETHING OF A MYSTERY Trump and endorsing him as a “killer,” high praise in Trump’s world. (It didn’t hurt that the operative was offering his services for free.)

Others blame Roger Stone, an on-again, off-again Trump adviser. Stone and Manafort learned the art of political propaganda as business partners in a firm that helped clients in regimes in Somalia, Zaire and the Philippines in the 1980s and ’90s. Still another version has it that Manafort charmed his way in on his own, convincing Trump family members Kushner, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., that he could sideline the increasingly besieged campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Or maybe Manafort was just someone Trump knew.

Manafort and Stone had lobbied for Trump back in the 1980s, when the mogul sought, among other things, a deeper dock in Atlantic City so he could park a yacht. In the coming years, their firm worked on projects big and small for Trump. Manafort bought a Trump Tower condo in 2006 for $3.7 million.

Much of what Manafort did at the campaign while he was there also remains a mystery. But the controversy over his appointment began immediately. Soon after he was announced as the campaign’s delegate wrangler, reporters started digging into his business dealings, including in Ukraine, resulting in a series of negative stories. Manafort attended a June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer at Trump Tower, where Russia’s efforts to help the campaign were to be discussed, postelection reports revealed.

And at the convention, the Republican National Committee’s official platform received changes that seemed to benefit Manafort’s proRussian Ukrainian clients.

However Manafort came in, it wasn’t long before he was on his way out. By August, Trump wanted a change. Manafort was gone on Aug. 19, 2016. In Trump’s telling, Manafort was someone who “was with the campaign, as you know, for a very short period of time.” After Manafort pleaded not guilty to nine counts on Oct. 30, his lawyer released a statement denying any collusion with Russia and praising Manafort’s work “to further democracy and to help the Ukrainians come closer to the United States and to the E.U.” Motivations here, unfortunately for Manafort, matter less than bank records. 

Gates, Manafort’s longtime business associate, is accused of transferring more than $3 million from offshore accounts

▽ fractured party continued its time-tested tactic of proceeding as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Lawmakers preferred to focus on the desperate quest for tax reform, which suffered another setback on Oct. 31 when it turned out that no one could agree on what to put in the mystery bill being worked out in secret. “Downplay, distance and deny,” is how one senior staffer to a Republican congressman described the strategy vis-àvis the investigation. GOP lawmakers are already weary and discouraged by their unproductive year, and badly estranged from a White House that gives them little direction or political cover (but plenty of trouble). A few hours after the charges were unsealed, at a press conference ostensibly about judicial nominations, reporters pelted the assembled Republican Senators with Mueller-related questions.

Rather than address them, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa turned on his heel and walked out the door, nearly knocking over a rack of American flags in the process.

“He’s demanding loyalty, and I’m afraid he’s going to continue to get it from Republicans, because he’s still popular among the Republican base,” says Peter Wehner, a former aide to President George W. Bush and a Trump opponent.

Certainly he has the loyalty of the conservative media; as Mueller turned up the heat on Trump, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal suddenly began to argue that the special prosecutor was out of control and should resign. “It’s all of a piece with Trump,” Wehner says. “It’s confrontation, it’s unrelenting conflict, it’s one civic guardrail after another pulled out of the ground and tossed aside.”

The chaos has disrupted the left too.

Outraged and mostly powerless, Democrats feuded in the wake of the charges over how to press the Russia issue. A top party donor, Tom Steyer, has pumped $10 million into ads calling for Trump’s

‘HE’S DEMANDING LOYALTY, AND I’M AFRAID HE’S GOING TO CONTINUE TO GET IT FROM REPUBLICANS.’ PETER WEHNER, former aide to

President George W. Bush

TIME November 13, 2017

PAUL MANAFORT’S ‘RIGHT-HAND MAN’

BY JUSTIN WORLAND

TRUMP’S FORMER DEPUTY CAMPAIGN MANAGER RICK GATES may lack the name recognition of his longtime boss, but he was a key player in Paul Manafort’s criminal scheme, according to the federal indictment released on Oct. 30.

Gates’ work with Manafort dates back to the 1980s, when he arrived as an intern at Manafort’s political consulting firm.

His role grew from there: the indictment lays out a range of his dubious duties, from arranging a fake document to help his boss secure more favorable terms on a loan to conveying messages from former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to D.C. lobbying and public-affairs firms.

Much like his mentor, Gates is said to have improperly used overseas funds to support a lavish lifestyle. He used the tax-free windfall to pay his mortgage, revamp his $1.9 million home and pay his children’s tuition.

Despite Gates’ role as Manafort’s “right-hand man,” the Richmond, Va.–based operative flew under the radar. He stayed on with the Trump campaign after Manafort was booted in August 2016, working through the election with campaign officials and the Republican National Committee. Later, he moved to a pro-Trump group, America First Policies, before joining a company run by Trump friend and fellow billionaire Tom Barrack. He was fired after the indictment.

Like Manafort, Gates, 45, pleaded not guilty to all charges. 

Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents

▽

A GUILTY PLEA OFFERS A PICTURE OF ATTEMPTED COLLUSION G AT E S : S U S A N W A L S H — A P/ R E X /S H U T T E R S T O C K ; PA PA D O P O U L O S : @ R E A L D O N A L D T R U M P/ T W I T T E R / R E U T E R S

BY HALEY SWEETLAND EDWARDS

UNTIL DONALD TRUMP NAMED HIM AMONG THE TOP foreign policy advisers to his presidential campaign in March 2016, George Papadopoulos was a political nobody.

Five years out of university, he’d traveled in Europe, worked for a think tank and spent about two months as a staffer on Ben Carson’s long-shot campaign. But the 30-year-old researcher is a nonentity no more. When he pleaded guilty on Oct. 5 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials during the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos rocketed to the center of an ongoing federal investigation into Moscow’s involvement in the 2016 election.

Papadopoulos’ emails, texts, Facebook messages and Skype conversations in 2016 provide perhaps the clearest picture so far of Russia’s attempts to assist the Trump campaign—and of top Trump staffers’ willingness to accept that help. Court records unsealed on Oct. 30 show that Papadopoulos, in his capacity as a Trump adviser, communicated regularly with Russian agents, encouraging cooperation and working to arrange meetings between Trump’s campaign officials and Russian agents. In one email, for example, one of Papadopoulos’ Russian sources offered to share “thousands of emails” providing “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, according to the records. In another, Papadopoulos tells top campaign staff that Russian President Vladimir Putin was prepared to host Trump “and the team

when the time is right.” In yet another, Papadopoulos tells a contact with ties to Moscow that a proposed meeting between “my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser” and Russian agents “has been approved by our side,” according to the records. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders scrambled to distance Trump from Papadopoulos by calling him a low-level “volunteer.” Trump, who once described him as an “excellent guy” during an interview with the Washington Post, followed the same script. “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George,” Trump tweeted on Oct. 31, “who has already proven to be a liar.”

But the court documents and transcripts associated with Papadopoulos’ plea agreement show that some of Trump’s top advisers worked closely with Papadopoulos for much of 2016. A “highranking campaign official” and a “campaign supervisor,” both of whom go unnamed in the documents, regularly replied to Papadopoulos’ emailed updates. In some cases, they forwarded them to other top Trump advisers for discussion. Not everyone was on board. At least one senior Trump aide squashed the idea of Trump meeting Putin directly, according to court documents. “We need someone to communicate that D.T. is not doing these trips,” the campaign official wrote in an email. “It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”

Papadopoulos’ role in the investigation doesn’t end there. After he was arrested in July 2017 upon landing at Dulles International Airport, outside Washington, he apparently agreed to become a “proactive cooperator” with federal agents. While there’s no precise definition of what that means, law-enforcement officials say it could mean Papadopoulos agreed to wear a wire during conversations with targets of the Mueller probe or otherwise helped to gather evidence. In a transcript of the Oct. 5 court hearing, Aaron Zelinsky, an attorney for the special counsel’s office, told the judge that Papadopoulos had helped federal agents identify important documents and guide future inquiries. Papadopoulos’ “efforts to cooperate,” Zelinsky notes, have provided investigators a useful “road map” for the months ahead. 

VIEWPOINT

impeachment, even as the party’s tacticians try to steer the conversation to higher ground. The Mueller probe also claimed a Democratic power broker, as the superlobbyist Tony Podesta stepped down from his firm, which had worked with Manafort on his Ukrainian campaign.

IN THE EXHAUSTING CYCLE of scandal and outrage that defines the Trump presidency, every development can seem like just more noise—a daylong freakout that will be forgotten in a few weeks, superseded by the next series of fights.

The Mueller matter, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, is “an investigation that, frankly, most Americans don’t care too much about.”

But Mueller isn’t at the mercy of public opinion or a frenetic news cycle. No clever spin or culture-ginning controversy will throw the dogged prosecutor off the scent.

His mission is different, and his filings were aimed at an audience of potential targets and collaborators, sending threatening or beguiling messages to whomever he might be going for next. He signaled that he has, in Papadopoulos, a cooperating witness who was arrested months ago. The revelation raises a host of tantalizing questions. Does that mean the obscure former adviser has been gathering evidence for the feds ever since? What will be the next target—will it be the former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who has already admitted acting as an unregistered foreign agent? Could Mueller come for Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-inlaw and confidant? And if the noose begins to tighten around the President’s own family, how might he react?

For now, Trump watched from afar as Manafort appeared in federal court in Washington, trailed by cameras, and pleaded not guilty. If the Russians were also watching, they might have smiled: if it was chaos they sought, this was beyond their wildest dreams. But in Mueller and his investigators, the threat to American democracy faces a different, formidable opponent. The gears of the legal system are turning; the rule of law, which Trump has not yet managed to master, is still in force. The case has just begun. All the President can do is watch it unfold—a helpless spectator, like the rest of us.

—With reporting by NASH JENKINS/ WASHINGTON □ TIME November 13, 2017

HOW BOB MUELLER WORKS A CASE

BY ROBERT ANDERSON

‘MUELLER KNOWS THEY’RE GOING TO ROLL OVER ON EACH OTHER. MARK MY WORDS, IT WILL START BECOMING A RACE TO THE SPECIAL COUNSEL’S OFFICE.’ ROBERT ANDERSON,

former FBI counterintelligence chief under special counsel Robert Mueller

I worked for Bob Mueller for 12 years while he was the FBI director, running counterintelligence, espionage and cybercrime investigations. What I saw recently was a classic law-enforcement response to a suspected Russian intelligence or political-influence operation. And it was classic Bob Mueller. Already, he appears to have uncovered details of a far-reaching Russian political-influence campaign.

Russian spy services use two main methods to run agents.

Either they recruit people as traditional assets, where the targets know they’re working for a foreign government. Or they use unwitting agents—people targeted to exploit not just what they know, but who they know. That’s what seems to have happened here. Russian intelligence services have run political-influence operations since the beginning of time, and if you put a seasoned intelligence officer in front of a traditional, unsuspecting businessman, there’s just no match.

The Russian goal appears to have been to use members of the Trump campaign to get at the ultimate target: Donald Trump himself. If I want to spy on Trump, I don’t need or necessarily want to get directly in front of him; I will use sources, or I will use an intermediary known as a cutout. The Russian intelligence services will then dangle something the cutout wants, whether it’s sex, money, drugs or information. In this case, it was Hillary Clinton’s emails.

To uncover just how far the Russian operation got, Mueller will focus his team. He’ll go after the lower-level or lower-ranking guys like George Papadopoulos. He’ll also use the strategy of following the money. In the next weeks and months, you’ll see more indictments. You’re going to see wire fraud. You’re going to see mail fraud. You’re going to see violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. You’re also going to see other charges. Moving money around countries to avoid taxes and criminal prosecution are the kinds of violations we saw continuously while I was working counterintelligence and espionage investigations.

A lot of those crimes carry 20-year prison sentences or more for a single violation. Which is why so many people are going to flip and roll over and testify for Mueller. Hard-core criminals aren’t going to talk. You can tell them you’re going to put them in jail for 100 years, but they don’t care. Professional, hard-core spies are not going to talk, because the foreign country they work for is going to retaliate or potentially kill family members left behind in their country.

But when you talk about people who are used to spending nearly $1 million in three years on business suits out of a place in Cyprus, those guys are not going to do 25 years in jail. It doesn’t matter who they are going to roll over on, there’s no way Manafort is going to do 25 years in jail if he can avoid it. He can’t last.

I would be greatly surprised if Papadopoulos is the only person who’s been cooperating with Mueller. Knowing the way we worked all these other very sophisticated cases for him, he potentially has other informants. And when the people who may be cooperating with the investigation start consensually recording conversations, it’s all over.

That’s why Bob Mueller’s going about this in the way that he is.

He knows these guys are not seasoned criminals. And he knows they’re going to roll over on each other. Mark my words, it will start becoming a race to the special counsel’s office.

Anderson is a managing director at Navigant. He was the assistant director of counterintelligence for Robert Mueller at the FBI from 2011 to 2013

▶ For more commentary, visit time.com/ideas

VIEWPOINTS

HOW THE FOUNDERS WOULD VIEW PAPADOPOULOS’ CRIME

BY CASS SUNSTEIN In the summer of 1787, the delegates to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia vigorously debated the question of whether the President should be impeachable. James Madison, the wisest of them all, insisted that impeachment was “indispensable,” because the President “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression.”

But the most eloquent delegate was George Mason: “Shall any man be above Justice? Above all shall that man be above it, who can commit the most extensive injustice?” Mason feared “the man who has practised corruption & by that means procured his appointment in the first instance.”

At the same time, the framers of the Constitution wanted to limit the occasions for impeachment. They sought to ensure that the President could not be impeached or removed from office merely because people disagreed with his decisions, or thought that he was foolish, reckless or otherwise doing a terrible job.

The idea of “high crimes and misdemeanors” was meant to refer to egregious abuses or misuses of presidential power, such as violations of civil liberties (“oppression”) or corruption (“peculation”).

From the standpoint of the founding generation, the most concerning revelation of the recent events was the guilty plea of George Papadopoulos.

His guilty plea is for false statements to the FBI, which are bad enough. But the real problem is the sordid tale, elaborated in the statement of the offense, of a stream of contacts between a member of Donald Trump’s foreign policy team and the Russian government.

In brief: in March 2016, Papadopoulos was named one

of five foreign policy advisers with the campaign. Shortly after, he met with two people, one of them a Russian national introduced as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.”

As a result, Papadopoulos developed extensive contacts with Russians and Russian officials. Eventually, he learned that they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and “thousands of emails.” Numerous conversations followed after that point. In communications with the FBI, Papadopoulos falsely stated that these discussions occurred before he joined the campaign. In short, he lied.

Viewed in light of the founding debates, Papadopoulos’ conduct was traitorous—the kind of conduct that would raise legitimate impeachment questions if it had been undertaken by a candidate personally. Recall Mason’s words. No aspirant to high office, and no adviser to any such aspirant, should engage with Russian officials about how to obtain “dirt” on a political opponent.

It is important to emphasize that at this time, there is no allegation, and no good reason to think, that Papadopoulos’ unexcellent adventure was coordinated with Trump personally. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty; no one else has done so.

But let’s not lose sight of a crucial fact. This foreign policy adviser did not merely make false statements of fact. He betrayed his country, along with the generation that fought for it and that founded it.

Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School and author of the new book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide

TRUMP’S BASE WILL DISMISS INDICTMENTS

BY ELISE JORDAN Having spent time listening to Donald Trump supporters all over America over the past year, I’ve gotten the message that the President’s voters do not care about scandals, real or perceived. The recent news is unlikely to put a dent in his popularity among the 33% of Americans who continue to approve of his job performance.

What these developments do affect in the short term is Trump’s ability to get something—anything—done. His amateurish Administration will be more distracted than ever, and the resulting paralysis on Capitol Hill may finally shake his base’s faith. The Administration will continue to divert attention to Hillary Clinton’s ties to a uraniumextraction deal. And supporters will likely take Sarah Huckabee Sanders at her word when she blithely declares that Manafort’s indictment “has nothing to do with us.”

Excuses and stall tactics, though, cannot alter the reality that the investigation is grinding the machinery of Trump’s presidency to a halt. Early promises to repeal Obamacare and repair the country’s dated infrastructure have already been abandoned, leaving tax reform as the only legislation that Trump and the Republican leadership can hope to pass before the year’s end—making it one year of nothing done on Trump’s watch. “But Neil Gorsuch ...” rings hollow as the lone achievement.

Jordan, a political analyst and TIME contributor, has worked for the State Department and the National Security Council

PAUL MANAFORT HAS NO REASON TO FLIP

BY MARTIN LONDON The legal pooh-bahs are all aflutter, issuing statements as to how this is the classic first prosecutorial step. Surely, Paul Manafort will crack, say the cognoscenti, and, as part of a plea bargain, will give evidence against somebody more important, perhaps even someone whose last name is Trump.

Not so fast. I project this scenario: Manafort, having already pleaded not guilty, clams up. He has no incentive to speak, because he has no fear. Months (or years) from now, just before trial, President Trump will issue some tweets to the effect of, “This is all an attack by Hillary Clinton supporters!” and pardon Manafort and anybody else who has been indicted by Robert Mueller. If Mueller then brings Manafort before the grand jury, Manafort will take the Fifth, because he is still subject to criminal liability in New York State, where much of the money laundering occurred.

Manafort’s assertion of the privilege will be upheld, because Trump’s pardon affected only federal charges.

For every move that Mueller makes, Trump has an effective counter that will disincentivize Manafort from talking. If Manafort refuses to testify, what is the result?

Criminal contempt? Like sheriff Joe Arpaio? Trump tops law enforcement again. Civil contempt? Perhaps, but that only lasts as long as the grand jury sits. Trump has a lot of trump cards and knows how to play ’em.

London, a retired lawyer and the author of The Client Decides, represented Vice President Spiro Agnew

THE 30 MOST

Influential Teens OF 2017

Who says teens aren’t changing the world? To determine our annual list (now in its fifth year), TIME considers accolades across numerous fields, global impact through social media and overall ability to drive news

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JIMMY MARBLE FOR TIME ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALEX FINE FOR TIME

AGE 16

Auli’i Cravalho A VOICE OF HER GENERATION

Even if you don’t immediately recognize Cravalho’s face, chances are you’ve heard her sing: the Hawaii native voiced the titular hero in Disney’s Moana, which grossed more than $640 million at the global box office.

She also delivered a powerful rendition of its hit song “How Far I’ll Go” at the 2017 Academy Awards—despite getting hit in the head by a prop mid-performance. “It was a good little [knock] to remind me I was at the Oscars,” she later joked.

Now Cravalho is taking on a new role. In January, she’ll star on NBC’s Rise, a drama about a high school theater department that lifts the spirits of a struggling steel town in Pennsylvania.

Cravalho says the premise, which is based on a true story, reinforced her belief that young people can effect real change—though it helps, she adds, to “find a troupe who will support you and be your megaphone” and to never let “being a teen make you feel like you make less of an impact.”

Cravalho would know.

On Rise she plays a character who, like her, is of Polynesian and Puerto Rican descent—a heritage that isn’t often portrayed onscreen. And while Cravalho is grateful that she gets to “share my culture with the world,” she’s also determined to help shift the status quo.

“Accurate representation matters,” she says. “I’m proud to be involved in projects that reflect the modern melting pot that is America.”

—Eliana Dockterman

AGE 19

STEVE LACY Next-gen music producer

When Lacy first set out to make music, he couldn’t even afford a laptop, let alone professional recording equipment. So instead, he turned his iPhone into a portable studio—using apps to make original drum patterns and guitar riffs, then layering on vocals he’d recorded using the mike. “You have to find a way with what you have,” he says. His way paid off: Lacy produced his band, the Internet’s 2015 release Ego Death, which went on to nab a Grammy nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album. Now, in addition to creating his own music, the Compton, Calif., native is producing tracks for artists like Big Sean and Kendrick Lamar. (He says the latter collaboration was like “my eighth-grade playlist coming full circle.”) As his profile—and his income—increases, Lacy has started to embrace more traditional producing platforms. He remains committed to his iPhone, though. “It’s scary to do things differently,” he says, “but I’m for the weirdos.” —Ashley Hoffman

▲ Lacy’s long-term goal: to get so successful that he can delete his social-media accounts. “I’d like to disappear.

Like Will Ferrell.

He doesn’t need Twitter.”

AGE 19

Muzoon Almellehan AN ADVOCATE FOR EDUCATION

▲ Almellehan, who has been called “the Syrian Malala [Yousafzai],” considers the Nobel Peace Prize winner “an amazing friend.”

For the millions of children living in refugee camps, the outlook is bleak: only half are enrolled in primary school and less than a quarter in secondary school, which severely limits their upward mobility. “They don’t have many options,” says Almellehan, who experienced these conditions firsthand after she fled Syria for Jordan in 2013. (Her family has since resettled in Newcastle, England.) Now she’s fighting to change that. In June, Almellehan became UNICEF’s youngest-ever goodwill ambassador. As part of her duties, she travels the world to evangelize the importance of education, especially in places like Chad, where the militant group Boko Haram has forced children out of school.

Ultimately, though, Almellehan plans to return to Syria. “Our country needs a strong generation,” she says. —Alexandra Sifferlin

AGE 17

Ethan and Grayson Dolan SOCIAL-MEDIA STARS

Ethan Dolan didn’t want to get his tongue pierced, but he had to. Those were the rules. He and his twin Grayson had just attempted a series of tongue challenges—like tying cherry stems into knots—and agreed, on camera, that the loser would get the piercing. Of course, the brothers could have called it off. But they would have to answer to their legions of socialmedia followers (27 million across Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook).

So in late September, the Dolans flew from L.A. to their home state of New Jersey, where piercing laws are less strict, to document Ethan’s experience in all its graphic glory; the resulting YouTube clip has 2 million views and counting.

It’s these kinds of outlandish stunts—coupled with their boyish charm and good looks—that have catapulted the Dolans into social-media stardom. As they put it, “We don’t like to limit ourselves to a certain category, such as ‘content creators’ or ‘influencers,’ because we like to do it all.” In practice, that has meant filming themselves doing everything from experimenting with spray tans to practicing gymnastics with Olympian Laurie Hernandez.

Increasingly, the Dolans are popping up offline as well. Earlier this year, they embarked on a nationwide variety-show tour, which sold out in several cities; now they’re regular correspondents on MTV’s relaunched TRL. But these gigs, they insist, are not jobs: “We enjoy what we do too much to consider it work.” —Raisa Bruner

TIME November 13, 2017

AGE 14

Shibby de Guzman FEARLESS ACTIVIST

It’s a risky move to speak out against Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, whose brutal war on drugs has left thousands dead. He told E.U. politicians to “go to hell” for raising human-rights concerns and branded Oxford University a “school for stupid people” after it published a study claiming he employs an army of online trolls to suppress dissent. His fiercest critic, Senator Leila de Lima, has been in jail for more than eight months.

None of this has deterred de Guzman, who shot to prominence after she was photographed protesting the lionization of late Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. She carried a megaphone and wore a cardboard sign similar to those sometimes strewn over the bodies of drug-war victims.

Then, in a widely shared social-media post, she shut down critics who alleged that her fellow protesters were “brainwashed”: “We completely know and understand the injustice we are protesting against.”

Now in the ninth grade, de Guzman hopes to rally even more young people to take action in the Philippines. “It’s so important that [they] know their own rights and when authorities abuse them,” she says. “There are values that aren’t up for debate.” —Joseph Hincks

AGE 15

SALVADOR GÓMEZ COLÓN Puerto Rico’s savvy fundraiser

Everything went dark when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico—including Colón’s San Juan neighborhood of Condado, one of many that could remain without power for at least a year. Initially, Colón says he felt scared and overwhelmed, especially when his family started to ration food. “Then I asked myself, How could I give people hope?” he says. The answer: Light and Hope for Puerto Rico, a Generosity campaign he started to raise money for solar lamps, hand-operated washing machines and other supplies for his neighbors in need. In four days, he raised $36,000; the total now stands at $75,000 and counting. Colón estimates that the money will be able to help at least 1,000 people. But he knows it’s only a start—and that the world should remember Puerto Rico still needs aid. “One day should not go by that we don’t remind ourselves of how we can make other people’s lives better,” he says. —Ashley Hoffman

▲ In the future, Colón says, he wants to be a doctor and a public-health advocate

AGE 13

Mikaila Ulmer THE BEES’ KEEPER

Like most kids her age, Ulmer used to hate bees. “I absolutely despised anything that buzzed,” she says. But shortly after she was stung, twice, in 2009, the Texas native developed a fascination with them. That’s when she learned that honeybees are critical to the ecosystem and are also going extinct. So Ulmer decided to help—with lemonade.

Using her great-grandmother’s recipe, Ulmer made a blend, sweetened with local honey, to sell at community business fairs, donating 10% of her profits to honeybee-

advocate groups. By 2014, her side project was a full-blown business.

Now, Me & the Bees Lemonade is stocked at more than 300 Whole Foods stores as well as at Wegmans and other grocers, and Ulmer runs a nonprofit, the Healthy Hive Foundation, to raise awareness about the plight of the honeybee.

Next up: finishing her first children’s book (it aims to teach kids how to start their own business) and expanding her company. To that end, Ulmer says, “I just hired my dad.” —Melissa Chan

RAYOUF ALHUMEDHI, 16 The Saudi teen led the charge to bring a “woman with headscarf” emoji to Apple smartphone keyboards everywhere, ensuring better representation of women like her. “It’s something important to my identity,” she says.

Alhumedhi proposed adding the symbol to the Unicode Consortium last year; it will soon become a standard character.

CHRISTIAN PULISIC, 19 The Pennsylvania soccer prodigy, who plays for the U.S. national team and in the German professional league, is poised to become America’s first top-flight international star: he has broken multiple goalscoring records and was a rare bright spot in the recent U.S. attempt to qualify for the World Cup. MADDIE ZIEGLER, 15 The Pittsburgh dancer is best known for playing Sia’s alter ego in a variety of performances and music videos. This year she also voiced a character in the animated movie Leap!, released a best-selling book and made her feature-film debut in Colin Trevorrow’s The Book of Henry.

HAN HYUN-MIN, 16 The Korean-Nigerian model is broadening beauty standards in South Korea, where he’s widely considered to be the country’s first black model. He’s a fixture in local magazines and has walked in 20 shows during the recent Seoul Fashion Week. “My dream is now a reality,” he says, “and I want those like me to feel they can achieve the same.”

AGE 18

NOAH CYRUS, 17 The daughter of country crooner Billy Ray and sister of showbiz veteran Miley is pursuing her own musical path, kicking things off this year with a collection of moody, emo-pop singles. Her first, “Make Me (Cry),” topped Spotify’s global viral charts; now she’s racking up performance credits, including as an opening act for Katy Perry’s latest world tour.

HU RANRAN Bold filmmaker

While depictions of LGBTQ lifestyles are relatively routine in Western media, China has taken several steps backward, rolling out new regulations in July that put homosexuality alongside incest as cases of “abnormal sexual relationships” unfit for broadcast.

So it was especially daring for Hu to direct Escape—a 75-minute film about a transgender youth coming to terms with his sexual identity— and release it in her home country.

“I wanted to address the theme of being yourself,” she says. To help realize her vision, which had basically no production budget, Hu tapped 37 students from her high school, which is affiliated with Beijing’s prestigious Renmin University. They made the sets and costumes themselves and shot the film mostly on school grounds.

Subsequent critical acclaim helped Hu gain a place at the University of California, Los Angeles, and reignited conversation about trans issues across the world’s most populous nation. “Getting to know [the stories of] LGBTQ people is the start to reducing prejudice,” Hu says.

—Charlie Campbell

WANG YUAN, 16 The Chinese singersongwriter and TV host, who first gained fame as a member of überpopular boy band TFBOYS (The Fighting Boys), is balancing his recently launched solo music career with work as a supporter of global youth education. This year he was named a UNICEF Special Advocate for Education.

SYDNEY MCLAUGHLIN, 18 The Olympic hurdler and sprinter from New Jersey was the youngest American on the trackand-field team in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Now a college student at the University of Kentucky, she’s poised to make big moves for the 2020 Games.

KHALID, 19 The Texas musician— whose debut album was fittingly titled American Teen—is one of R&B’s hottest new acts.

His music, including the hit single “Young Dumb & Broke,” has been streamed over a billion times worldwide, earning Khalid a spot as an opener for Lorde and a win at the MTV Video Music Awards for Best New Artist.

TIME November 13, 2017

AGE 13

Millie Bobby Brown STRANGER THINGS’ STANDOUT

Not many actors can say they got an Emmy nomination, and worldwide fame, for convincing the world that they have superpowers. Brown can, thanks to her role on Netflix’s sci-fi ’80s-nostalgia-fest Stranger Things. She plays Eleven, a mysterious girl—part science experiment, part prodigy, part awkward teen—who uses telekinesis to ward off evil.

But there’s remarkable nuance in Brown’s performance, the kind that is able to convey melancholy beneath magic. It has made Eleven the standout character on a show brimming with them, one who inspires Internet memes, Halloween costumes and newfound interest in Eggo waffles (Eleven’s favorite food). Brown’s own profile has risen as well.

Since the show’s July 2016 debut, the British actor has rapped at the Golden Globes, signed with IMG Models and appeared on the covers of Entertainment Weekly, InStyle and more. One secret to Brown’s success? Not overthinking her craft. “Eleven is part of me and always will be. I don’t try with her,” she told TIME during a Stranger Things set visit earlier this year. “I don’t even know my lines for today’s scene ... and that’s what makes it so instinctual.” —Daniel D’Addario

ISAAC HEMPSTEAD WRIGHT, 18 The U.K. native has spent eight years playing Bran Stark, a character whose every move is scrutinized by Game of Thrones’ massive fan base—especially during the most recent season. But Hempstead Wright isn’t fazed by the attention: “It means that pretty much everywhere you go, you’re met with the warmest of welcomes.”

ELLE FANNING, 19 The Georgia-born actor (and sister to Dakota) has become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after young stars, thanks to buzzy roles in films like The Neon Demon, 20th Century Women and, most recently, Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled. “From nothing to something,” she tells TIME of creating a story. “That’s very enticing to me.”

AGE 15

MOZIAH BRIDGES Budding fashion mogul

At age 9, Bridges launched his own handmade bow-tie business from his grandmother’s kitchen table. Now Mo’s Bows is worth about $1.5 million—thanks in part to his 2015 appearance on ABC’s Shark Tank and, more recently, a licensing deal with the NBA that lets Bridges sell bow ties featuring team logos. But the Memphis native has even grander ambitions: he plans to expand globally, breaking into new clothing markets (he just released a line of neckties), while working toward graduating from high school and getting his driver’s license. “My all-time goal is to be a fashion mogul and a good person overall,” says Bridges, who credits his success to his inborn sense of style. (He says he would “go to the playground in a suit and tie.”) At home, though, his mom is still the boss: Bridges wants a Range Rover for his upcoming birthday, but she has made it clear that he’s “going to get the 2007 Jetta in the garage.” —Melissa Chan

KRTIN NITHIYANANDAM, 17 The part-time research scientist has made headlines for his work improving early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and helping to cure hard-to-treat forms of breast cancer. He’s also nabbed prizes at both the Google Science Fair and the U.K.’s Young Scientists and Engineers Competition.

KAIA GERBER, 16 The daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber has inherited her mother’s fashion savvy, walking in 18 shows during her first year on the catwalk and snagging campaigns for brands like Hudson Jeans and Marc Jacobs Beauty.

AGE 17

JADEN SMITH, 19 The self-described misfit—and son of Will and Jada Pinkett—has already established himself as an actor (The Karate Kid), budding entrepreneur and socialmedia philosopher. This fall, he will release his debut album, SYRE, accompanied by a visual project.

WILLOW SMITH, 17 Jaden’s sister, who first rose to prominence with her 2010 breakout hit single “Whip My Hair,” has since emerged as one of her generation’s most intriguing young artists, thanks in part to her provocative music. Her latest single, “Romance,” imagines a world were “morality doesn’t exist” and “man and women stay equal in the eyes of society.”

BROOKLYN BECKHAM, 18 U.K. soccer icon David and designer Victoria’s eldest son—who recently started college at Parsons—is making a name for himself as a photographer. Last year he shot a campaign for Burberry Brit; this year he published a book of his moody, black-andwhite snaps.

YARA SHAHIDI, 17 The breakout star of ABC’s black-ish is getting her own spinoff, grown-ish, which premieres in January.

The show will tackle weighty issues—like race and class—though the comedic lens of college.

“My family taught me to use my voice, my work, to help better society,” Shahidi says.

▼ To see more on these teens, including expanded interviews, visit time.com/ teens2017

TIME November 13, 2017

Chloe Kim GOLDEN GIRL

When Kim’s father first took her snowboarding near the family’s home in Orange County, California, when she was 4, Kim didn’t fall hard for the sport. “I wanted to go play My Little Ponies,” she says.

“But I was stuck on a mountain.” That was then. Now Kim, who last year became the first woman to land back-to-back 1080s (three full revolutions in the air) in competition, is widely seen as a favorite to win gold at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Although Kim is American and a member of Team USA, she’ll also in effect be competing on home turf: both her parents were born in South Korea, and several of her South Korean relatives plan to cheer her on. “It’ll be a good experience to go through such a crazy event with my family,” says Kim. “But at the same time, I’m very worried, ’cause it’s the freaking Olympics. I want to do really good. I’ve got to nail it.” —Sean Gregory

AGE 19

SHAWN MENDES Pop-music phenomenon Mendes, like Justin Bieber before him, may have risen to fame on a social-media platform (in his case, the defunct video app Vine). But he has since become one of pop music’s biggest stars. In the past three years, Mendes has released two blockbuster albums and several hit singles, including “Stitches,” “Mercy” and “Treat You Better”; his latest, “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back,” has logged more than 700 million streams. And the Canadian singer has no plans to slow down. “I’m just honing and getting better at my craft,” he says of writing songs for his as-yet-unannounced third LP. “So I hope what comes out will be the best album yet by a landslide.” In the meantime, he remains focused on entertaining his many young fans—Mendes has 26 million followers on Instagram alone—and encouraging them to pursue their passions. “I always want people to feel like they can do anything,” he says, “and I hope that I can inspire them.” —Raisa Bruner

▲ Mendes’ musical inspirations include John Mayer, Justin Timberlake and Ed Sheeran

AGE 19

Bretman Rock BEAUTY GURU

There is nobody on the Internet more fabulous than Rock. Just ask him. The Hawaii-based Filipino beauty vlogger shot to fame for demonstrating makeup skills—fierce contouring, flawless eyebrows—that could give the Kardashians a run for their money. But the real reason Rock (born Bretman Rock Sacayanan) has racked up nearly 9 million Instagram followers is his larger-than-life personality, best seen in the musings he posts alongside his glam how-tos.

Among his favorite topics: his haters (“This nose can be fixed

with contour ... but your attitude and personality can’t”), his appearance (“I’m, like, really cute”) and his friends and family (“Don’t forget to appreciate everyone you have in your life ... not everyone is blessed to have them like you do”). Now Rock is building a career off that cheeky candor. Earlier this year, he hosted the Miss Universe redcarpet preshow; in September he kicked off a national tour to meet his biggest fans. “I think the universe is taking quite good care of [me],” he says.

—Cady Lang

MOVIES

Taika Waititi takes Marvel for an indie spin

By Eliana Dockterman

Time Off Reviews

Thor (Hemsworth) and the Hulk (Ruffalo) finally answer the question, Who would win in a fight?

TIME November 13, 2017

‘Traditionally, Thor is basically a good-looking rich kid from outer space.

You don’t want to root for that guy.’

TAIKA WAITITI, Thor:

Ragnarok director

first movie, those films focused on misfit kids in search of family. They also upended stereotypes about the Maori, the indigenous New Zealanders.

(Waititi is half Maori.) Both movies set records for the highest-grossing local films in New Zealand.

Waititi won awards at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals.

Yet as his fame grew in his native country, Waititi assiduously avoided Hollywood. He bailed on the Disney princess flick Moana after writing a first draft in favor of making the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows with fellow Kiwi Jemaine Clement from the comedy Flight of the Conchords. Waititi says his worst nightmare is becoming “a writer for hire in Burbank.” And yet here he is at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills promoting a Marvel superhero movie that he directed. It happens to be a delightfully weird one: The film about Thor’s tribulations as an enslaved gladiator features a sensitive rock monster played by Waititi himself, Jeff Goldblum in turquoise eyeliner and a gag about the Hulk’s private parts. But it is a superhero movie nonetheless. Says the director of how he got here: “I’m just as surprised as everyone else.”

HIS FATHER WAS a farmer and artist, and Waititi dabbled in painting, animation, photography, poetry and stand-up comedy in his 20s and 30s. His visual art is irreverent and sometimes political, like a series of U.S. dollar bills in which the Presidents have been replaced by figures like a Ku Klux Klan

P R E V I O U S PA G E : J A S I N B O L A N D — M A R V E L S T U D I O S; T H O R : M A R V E L S T U D I O S

TAIKA WAITITI WAS WEARING A G-STRING WHEN he decided to start making his own movies. It was 2002, more than a decade before Marvel plucked the director from his native New Zealand and tasked him with revamping the formulaic Thor series into a psychedelic romp for the God of Thunder’s third film, Thor: Ragnarok. Back then, Waititi was just an actor playing a stripper in an Australian television series called the The Strip. And he was not happy about it. “I was being paid money.

So on the one hand, I was eating and paying rent,” says Waititi, 42. “On the other hand, I was creatively depressed, because I was getting my body waxed and having to eat tuna all day. I remember thinking, ‘I’m helping to make someone else’s bad idea. I’m sure I have better ideas than this.’”

He did. During breaks in the greenroom on set, Waititi wrote his first film, a short about three kids hanging out in a parking lot titled Two Cars, One Night. The movie’s mix of childish innocence and deadpan humor has since become Waititi’s trademark. It was also nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. When the camera cut to Waititi’s seat during the ceremony, he pretended to be asleep. “Because that film did really well, I felt like the pressure was on to direct as a job,” he says.

But he could also create parts for himself—ones that didn’t involve giving lap dances. He played a pot-smoking dad with killer Michael Jackson dance moves in his 2010 movie Boy and a priest who gives a funeral sermon about Doritos in his ’16 movie Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Like his

BTS: JASIN BOL A ND — M ARVEL STUDIOS

member or Ronald McDonald. It’s clear why Waititi wound up an actor: he has a surplus of energy that lends itself to comedy. During my interview with him, he not only fidgets but also manages to contort himself into 12 distinct positions on the couch. This goofiness almost covers up the fact that he’s also got movie-star looks and a slick sense of style: fellow director Ava DuVernay recently called him the “best-dressed helmer in the business” after he wore a pineapple romper to an appearance at San Diego Comic-Con. It’s especially gauche to brag in New Zealand, which is why Waititi brushes compliments off with self-deprecation. But we’re in America now. “Here, it’s almost like you have to do that to be successful,” he says. Coming to Hollywood has consequently been a bit of a culture shock.

“I learned very early from my family that there’s no money in art, which is nice. It takes the pressure off,” he says.

“But people get passion for art and passion for fame confused here. So many actors are like, ‘I love the craft,’ and I’m like, ‘No, you love being recognized on the street.’”

That is not true, Waititi says, of Thor star Chris Hemsworth.

(The two became friends a few years ago after Hemsworth congratulated the director on Boy’s success.) But when Marvel asked Waititi to pitch a Thor movie, the duo decided to keep their budding bromance under wraps. Neither wanted Waititi to get the job because of Hemsworth. Once he officially came onto the project in 2015, Waititi and Hemsworth quickly began plotting how they could revise Marvel’s most perfect—and perhaps most boring—superhero.

The second Thor movie got middling reviews, and Hemsworth had expressed doubts about the future of the franchise. Waititi is usually attracted to stories about outsiders, and Thor seemed to be the ultimate insider: when he lands on earth, girls swarm around him in hopes of grabbing selfies.

“Traditionally, Thor is basically a good-looking rich kid from outer space,” says Waititi. “You don’t want to root for that guy. So how do you knock him down?”

You take away his powers. In Ragnarok, Thor is unceremoniously stripped of his hammer, his ability to control the skies, his freedom and, most shockingly to fans, his long locks. The Goddess of Death Hela (Cate Blanchett) arrives to set the apocalypse in motion, and Thor finds himself

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THUNDER DOWN UNDER Waititi coaxed stars like Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum and Tessa Thompson (above) to flex their comedic muscles on the set of Thor in Australia.

on a strange planet where he must compete in gladiatorial competitions with powerful creatures, including the Hulk.

Without his accoutrements, Thor is forced to rely on his personality, and Waititi was determined to give him one. The director made use of Hemsworth’s knack for self-deprecating humor, first exhibited in last year’s Ghostbusters.

“Chris is great at making fun of himself, which I was shocked nobody had exploited earlier,” says Waititi. They ditch Thor’s self-aggrandizing in favor of sheepish lines like, “I lost my hammer, like, yesterday, so that’s still pretty fresh.”

Waititi’s style involves a good deal of improvisation, which seems to have worked for Hemsworth and the Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo. In one improvised scene, the two Avengers share a heart-to-heart about their hot tempers while wearing only towels and lounging together on a bed. “I was filming this thinking, Is there any reality in which this ends up in the movie? Because this belongs in a Sundance film,” says Waititi. But the scene made it in.

Previous marriages between big studios and indie directors haven’t been so harmonious.

LucasFilm (which, like Marvel, is owned by Disney) has parted ways with three directors over differences for its Star Wars films. When other directors like Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) or Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) make the leap from independent to studio films, their quirky voices are often subsumed by the formulas that drive big-budget films.

Not so for Waititi. Ragnarok’s humor is strange, the scenes character-driven, the plot isolated from the rest of the Marvel universe. It’ll either point superhero films in a refreshing direction or send fans into spasms over lack of reverence for the source material. Either way, 17 movies in, Marvel was willing to take the risk. “I had my doubts,” says Waititi of collaborating with the studio. “But I decided to focus on my strengths and let Marvel help me with the Marvel stuff. Like, I can never remember how many Infinity Stones there are.”

(The powerful gems are scattered throughout Marvel’s movies. There are six of them.)

After Ragnarok premieres, Waititi plans to return to New Zealand. He’ll work on one of the scripts he has stowed away, like a mockumentary on werewolves or a stop-motion animated movie about Michael Jackson’s pet chimp, Bubbles. In other words, more of the wonderfully weird same. □

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Time Off Reviews

MOVIES

Lady Bird: the pains of being pure at heart

M E R I E W A L L A C E — A 24

By Stephanie Zacharek WRITER-DIRECTOR GRETA GERWIG’S SEMIautobiographical Lady Bird is both generous and joyous, but when it stings, it stings deep. At one point, Saoirse Ronan, as disgruntled high school senior Christine, begs her mother, Laurie Metcalf’s Marion, for a magazine at the supermarket: “It’s only $3! I’m having a bad week!” Marion brushes her off, and it could be the usual mom move of just saying no—until she reaches the cash register and you realize that this respectable-looking suburban woman can barely cover the family groceries.

There’s no lingering, sentimental camera work, no telltale bummer music. Metcalf’s face betrays nothing so obvious as frustration or anxiety.

Instead, it’s as if every molecule of her body has been, out of necessity, trained to count money.

Meanwhile, when you’re a teenage girl wanting a magazine—so you can look at makeup ads, or pictures of rock stars, or fashion spreads featuring clothes you can’t afford but want to ogle anyway— it is among the world’s most straightforward, achievable desires. This measly dream costs $3, and Christine’s mother won’t—can’t—let her have it.

There are tons of movies about coming of age in the suburbs, but few are as astute as Lady Bird when it comes to class. Even so, the movie—set in Sacramento circa 2002—is more universal than it is insular. Gerwig knows, as her young heroine doesn’t yet, that what really defines you as an emerging grownup is how you handle everything else clustered around issues of money. The first love who’s all sorts of wrong yet also perfectly right, the desire to hang with the cool crowd only to realize that your longtime, uncool friends are a thousand times better and, perhaps most complicated of all, the slow crawl toward a truce with the parent who drives you crazy.

Gerwig has a sense of humor about even fairly painful subjects. She doesn’t make filmmaking, or filmgoing for that matter, seem like drudgery.

Ronan’s Christine—the movie’s title comes from the new name she’s given herself, a misguided teenage attempt at reinvention—attends a Catholic school she can barely tolerate, though this isn’t one of those joints filled with awful nuns. The great Lois Smith appears as Sister Sarah Joan, aged but groovy, who looks at the awkward raspberry tint of Christine’s hair and the half-affected scowl beneath it and sees nothing but promise.

Christine finds that very nice first boyfriend (Lucas Hedges) and a less-than-satisfactory second

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Ronan as Christine, a.k.a. Lady Bird. She wants everything, right away, yet even a $3 magazine is out of reach

one (Timothée Chalamet). But mostly she fights with her mother, and if words were bayonets, blood would flow. Meanwhile, Christine’s beloved, depression-prone dad (Tracy Letts) looks on helplessly, though he does become her partner in crime in pulling off her one big goal.

Lady Bird’s performances are all lovely, which you could chalk up to smart casting. But maybe it’s also that Gerwig—who previously co-directed, with Joe Swanberg, the 2008 Nights and Weekends—is kind of like the cartoon Sleeping Beauty, good at breezily orchestrating the special gifts of each bird in the forest. She’s certainly attuned to Ronan, who resembles a Leonardo da Vinci Madonna, if you were to add a few angry teenage thunderbolts and a scattering of mild acne. Beneath all that free-radical exasperation, Christine’s face is radiant, open, alive. It’s only when she gets everything she ever wanted that she’s hit by the weight of all she’s left behind. That’s usually how it works around age 18.

Lady Bird puts you right back there, no matter how many years have elapsed. □

Time Off Reviews

Point-counterpoint: So far Silverman has interviewed guests including Senator Al Franken and activist DeRay Mckesson TELEVISION

The new politics of late-night talk

By Daniel D’Addario

TIME November 13, 2017

anti!) and then leaves. It’s good to talk to people outside your bubble, but just giving airtime to people saying they’re opposed to civil rights, without elaboration, context or insight feels unproductive. I Love You, America is premised on an idea—that all Americans have a kinship and a basic responsibility to listen to one another—that neither

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RISING COMEDY STARS Klepper was a correspondent on The Daily Show; Thede, the only black woman currently hosting a late-night series, was head writer of the now canceled Nightly Show.

I LOVE YOU, AMERICA streams Thursdays on Hulu; THE OPPOSITION airs Monday through Thursday at 11:30 p.m. E.T. on Comedy Central; THE RUNDOWN airs Thursdays at 11 p.m. E.T. on BET

S I LV E R M A N : E R I N S I M K I N — H U L U; K L E P P E R : B R A D B A R K E T — C O M E DY C E N T R A L /G E T T Y I M A G E S; T H E D E : E R I C L I E B O W I T Z— B E T

BY THE TIME THE CLOCK HITS 11 P.M. each day, it can feel as if you’ve been through a week’s worth of news. This acceleration has divided late-night hosts into two classes. It’s not really political vs. apolitical, but rather agile comedy that crystallizes the moment vs. the kind of comedy that worked best before recent rapid cultural change. Three new TV shows are trying to find that line with varying success.

Sarah Silverman’s weekly Hulu show I Love You, America is the most hyped and, so far, the least successful.

Silverman is a gifted comic who rose to fame as a rule-breaking provocateur.

In the Trump era, she has committed herself to finding common groun nd by going back to an old-school civics-class style of communication.

But how much uniting is she really doing? In the show’s first two episodes, Silverman visits groups of Trump voters, specifically asks them how they feel about gay rights, hears them out (many are

side seems particularly inclined to accept on faith anymore. And Silverman, uncharacteristically timid, doesn’t work hard enough to convince you. A show aiming to bring a divided nation together would have to be executed with a crystalline point of view, which this one just doesn’t have. (Outside comedy, Oprah Winfrey has been trying a similar mission on 60 Minutes this fall, with some success. But that’s Oprah.)

Jordan Klepper’s haute-ironic The Opposition is more successful.

Running nightly in the time slot once occupied by The Colbert Report, the show has a similar enough conceit: comedian Klepper plays an Infowars– style conspiracist whose support of the President originates in a belief that everyone else is lying to him. It’s an idea that’s at least responsive to something in the air. Klepper isn’t yet the actor Stephen Colbert was—he wants to be liked too much to commit to the noxiousness of his bit. But the show is amusing, particularly when binged. Running gags repeat to the point of exhaustion, and that’s the point. At its best, The Opposition evokes the airless paranoia evoked by following the news too closely.

The best of the new wave of political chat is Robin Thede’s weekly variety show The Rundown on BET, which mixes an ESPN-style list of topics to be quickly toggled through with taped comedy sketches. Thede, an appealing onscreen presence who used to write for Comedy Central’s short-lived The Nightly Show, isn’t trying to speak to or for everyone like Silverman, or to inhabit a character like Klepper. Her show is rooted in black culture and the black experience.

A recent taped bit about black pot entrepreneurs in Oakland, Calif., for instance, made surprising points available nowhere else on late night.

Thede is sharper, so far, on pop-culture topics that few other hosts are covering top thaan on politics—but her presence in latee night feels like a retort to both our currrent politics and to much of late nigght. No matter what is in the headlines, Thede is unafraid to clap back.

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HELP SAVE THE FRIDGE

8 Questions

Henry Louis Gates Jr. The scholar is busy with a new book, 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, a forthcoming anthology and the fourth season of Finding Your Roots Which of the facts in your book do you think is most amazing? The first African American was Juan Garrido, who joined Ponce de Leon’s expedition to Florida, searching for the fountain of youth—the fact that there was a black man present at that event. One of the most shocking facts to me is that there were black slaveholders.

You write about how the 1957 book that inspired this one used genealogy to debunk racial purity. How does that square with your mission on Finding Your Roots? I have a couple of missions. One is to show that we’re all descended from people who came to this country from somewhere else.

Secondly, that we’re all related. If you go back far enough, everybody came out of Africa. This idea still makes some people uncomfortable.

You’ve spoken of yourself as someone who loves being black. How do you see that fitting together with the fact that we’re all related? Ulysses is about 24 hours in the life of a Jewish man in Dublin, but if a student wrote that summary, you would say, “You missed the point.” You don’t read Hamlet to learn about princes in Denmark. The only way you can get to the universal is through a specific cultural history. To me that specificity is the African and African-American experience.

You co-edited the new Annotated African American Folktales. One of TIME November 13, 2017

‘We’re all related.

If you go back far enough, everybody came out of Africa.

This idea still makes some people uncomfortable.’

You’ve described the role of the griot, a traditional West African storyteller, as telling the community the truth about itself. Yeah, the griot was not going to be elected President. People were trying to kill him.

What truth do you think our society needs to hear right now? One is that America is a nation of immigrants. The contributions of any of its many elements are just as great as the contributions of any of its other elements.

What do you think should be done about Confederate statues? Moving the statues to museums would be one idea. Often people think, If I take down that statue, I will erase the racism that the person represented and the statue embodied. It doesn’t work that way. So I would also encourage an additive approach. Maybe if there’s a statue of Robert E. Lee, he needs to be surrounded

by Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. The one thing I know is, when you take down a statue, you give people cause. We need to build bridges rather than barriers.

Are you optimistic about our ability to do that? Yeah. I think that, in many ways, we’re in a crisis right now. Those who love truth, justice and the great American tradition of democracy have to determine that we’re not going to succumb to temptations to demonize. That is a dead end.—LILY ROTHMAN

GILBERT CARR ASQUILLO — GE T T Y IMAGES

What do you think of the role of personal identity in American culture?

I had this injection for my sciatica, and when the doctor said, “It’s going to pinch,” I wasn’t thinking about Frederick Douglass. I was thinking about how somebody was about to put this needle in me. You’re not thinking, “Well, as an African American …” at every point in the day. It’s silly to try to consign the great multiplicity of our lives to one single identity, even one as resplendent as the African-American tradition.

your books is about facts and one is about myths. How do you balance those? How do you put an explanation on the fact that we walk this earth and then you’re gone? It’s one thing to be able to just narrate what you see around you, but it’s another thing to put it in figurative language. You have to do both.

Friend in town, dinner in fridge, kids at practice.

Happiest hour.

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